Produced by Al Haines
[Transcriber's note: This book had varying page headings. They have
been collected into chapter titles, and into a Table of Contents.]
BESIDE
STILL WATERS
BY
ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON
FELLOW OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
"_I will run the way of Thy commandments;
when Thou hast set my heart at liberty._"
FOURTH IMPRESSION
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1910
[All rights reserved]
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
CONTENTS
I The Family--The Scene--The Church--Childhood--Books
II The Schoolmaster--School Life--Companions
III The Public School--Friendships--The Opening Heart--The
Mould--The Last Morning
IV Undergraduate Days--Strain--Recovery--A First Book
V Practical Life--The Official World--Drudgery--Resignation--
Retirement
VI His Father's Friendship--His Sister's Death--The Silent River
VII Liberty--Cambridge--Literary Work--Egotism
VIII Foundations of Faith--Duality--Christianity--The Will of God
IX Art--The End of Art
X Retrospect--Renewal of Youth--The New Energy
XI Platonism--The Pure Gospel--The Pauline Gospel--The Harmony
XII Sacrifice--The Church--Certainty
XIII Waiting for Light
XIV Dreariness--Romance--The Choice of Work--Dulness--A Creed
XV The Pilgrim's Progress--The Pilgrimage--Development--The
Eternal Will
XVI Humanity--Individuality--The Average
XVII Spring--Wonder
XVIII His Father's Death--Illness--A New Home--The New Light
XIX Women--The Feminine View--Society--Frank Relations--
Coldness--Sensitiveness
XX Limitations--Sympathy--A Quiet Choice--The Mind of God--
Intuition
XXI A Far-off Day--A Compact--Fragrant Memories
XXII Death--The Real and the Ideal--A Thunder Shower--Storm
and Shadow
XXIII The Club--Homewards--The Garden of God
XXIV The Romance of Life--The Renewal of Youth--Youth
XXV A Narrow Path--A Letter--Asceticism--The Narrow Soul
XXVI Activity--Work--Isolation
XXVII Progress--Country Life--Sustained Happiness--The Twilight
XXVIII Democracy--Individualism--Corporateness--Materialism
XXIX Bees--A Patient Learner
XXX Flowers--The Garden
XXXI A Man of Science--Prophets--A Tranquil Faith--Trustfulness
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
XXXIII Music--Church Music--Musicians--The Organ--False Asceticism
XXXIV Pictorial Art--Hand and Soul--Turner--Raphael--Secrets of Art
XXXV Artistic Susceptibility--An Apologia--Temperament--Criticism
of Life--The Tangle
XXXVI The Mill--The Stream's Pilgrimage
XXXVII A Garden Scene--The Wine of the Soul
XXXVIII The Lakes--On the Fell--Peace
XXXIX A Friend--The Gate of Life
XL A Funeral Pomp--The Daily Manna--The Lapsing Moment
XLI Following the Light--Sincerity
XLII Aconite--The Dropping Veil
BESIDE STILL WATERS
I
The Family--The Scene--The Church--Childhood--Books
Hugh Neville was fond of tender and minute retrospect, and often
indulged himself, in lonely hours, with the meditative pleasures of
memory. To look back into the old years was to him like gazing into a
misty place, with sudden and bright glimpses, and then the cloud closed
in again; but it was not only with his own life that he concerned
himself; he liked to trace in fancy his father's eager boyhood, brought
up as he had been in a great manufacturing town, by a mother of
straitened means, who yet maintained, among all her restrictions, a
careful tradition of gentle blood and honourable descent. The children
of that household had been nurtured with no luxuries and few
enjoyments. Every pound of the small income had had its appointed use;
but being, as they were, ardent, emotional natures, they had contrived
to extract the best kind of pleasure out of books, art, and music; and
the only trace that survived in Hugh's father of the old narrow days,
was a deep-seated hatred of wastefulness and luxury, which, in a man of
generous nature, produced certain anomalies, hard for his children,
living in comparative wealth and ease, to interpret. His father, the
boy observed, was liberal to a fault in large matters, but scrupulously
and needlessly particular about small expenses. He would take the
children on a foreign tour, and then practise an elaborate species of
discomfort, in an earnest endeavour to save some minute disbursements.
He would give his son a magnificent book, and chide him because he cut
instead of untying the string of the parcel. Long after, the boy,
disentangling his father's early life in diaries and letters, would
wish, with a wistful regret, that he had only had the clue to this
earlier; he would have sympathised, he thought, with the idea that lay
beneath the little economies, instead of fretting over them, and
discussing them rebelliously with his sisters. His father was a man of
almost passionate affections; there was nothing in the world that he
more desired than the company and the sympathy of his children; but he
had, besides this, an intense and tremulous sense of responsibility
towards them. He attached an undue importance to small indications of
character; and thus the children were seldom at ease with their father,
because he rebuked them constantly, and found frequent fault, doing
almost violence to his tenderness, not from any pleasure in
censoriousness, but from a terror, that was almost morbid, of the
consequences of the unchecked development of minute tendencies.
Hugh's mother was of a very different disposition; she was fully as
affectionate as his father, but of a brighter, livelier, more facile
nature; she came of a wealthy family, and had never known the hard
discipline from which his father had suffered. She was a good many
years younger than her husband; they were united by the intensest
affection; but while she devoted herself to him with a perfect
understanding of, and sympathy with, his somewhat jealous and
puritanical nature, she did not escape the severity of his sense of
responsibility, and his natural instinct for attempting to draw those
nearest to him into the circle of his high, if rigid, standards. Long
afterwards, Hugh grew to discern a greater largeness and liberality in
her methods of dealing with life and other natures than his father had
displayed; and no shadow of any kind had ever clouded his love and
admiration for his mother; his love indeed could not have deepened; but
he came gradually to discern the sweet and patient wisdom which, after
many sorrows, nobly felt and ardently endured, filled and guided her
large and loving heart.
His father, after a highly distinguished academical career, entered the
Church; and at the time of Hugh's birth he held an important country
living together with one of the Archdeaconries of the diocese.
Hugh was the eldest child. Two other children, both sisters, were born
into the household. Hugh in later days loved to trace in family papers
the full and vivid life which had surrounded his unconscious self. His
mother had been married young, and was scarcely more than a girl when
he was born; his father was already a man grave beyond his years, full
of affairs and constantly occupied. But his melancholy moods, and they
were many, had drawn him to value with a pathetic intentness the quiet
family life. Hugh could trace in old diaries the days his father and
mother had spent, the walks they had taken, the books they had read
together. There seemed for him to brood over those days, in
imagination, a sort of singular brightness. He always thought of the
old life as going on somewhere, behind the pine-woods, if he could only
find it. He could never feel of it as wholly past, but rather as
possessing the living force of some romantic book, into the atmosphere
of which it was possible to plunge at will.
And then his own life; how vivid and delicate the perceptions were!
Looking back, it always seemed to be summer in those days. He could
remember the grassy walks of the pleasant garden, which wound among the
shrubberies; the old-fashioned flowers, sweet-williams and
Canterbury-bells, that filled the deep borders; the rose-garden, with
the pointed white buds, or the big-bellied pink roses, full of scent,
that would fall at a touch and leave nothing but an orange-seeded
stump. But there had been no thought of pathos to him in those years,
as there came to be afterwards, in the fading of sweet things; it was
all curious, delightful, strange. The impressions of sense were
tyrannously strong, so that there was hardly room for reflection or
imagination; there was the huge chestnut covered with white spires,
that sent out so heavy a fragrance in the spring that it was at last
cut down; but the felling of the tree was a mere delightful excitement,
not a thing to be grieved over. The country was very wild all round,
with tracts of heath and sand. The melodious buzzing of nightjars in
hot mid-summer evenings, as they swept softly along the heather, lived
constantly in his memory. In the moorland, half a mile away, stood
some brick-kilns, strange plastered cones, with blackened tops, from
which oozed a pungent smoke; those were too terrible to be visited
alone; but as he walked past with his nurse, it was delightful and yet
appalling to look into the door of the kiln, and see its fiery, glowing
heart. Two things in particular the boy grew to love; one was the
sight of water in all its forms; a streamlet near the house trickled
out of a bog, full of cotton-grass; there were curious plants to be
found here, a low pink marsh-bugle, and the sundew, with its strange,
viscid red hands extended; the stream passed by clear dark pools to a
lake among the pines, and fell at the further end down a steep cascade;
the dark gliding water, the mysterious things that grew beneath, the
fish that paused for an instant and were gone, had all a deep
fascination for the boy, speaking, as they seemed to do, of a world
near and yet how far removed from his own!
And then still more wonderingly, with a kind of interfusion of terror
and mystery, did he love the woodlands of that forest country. To
steal along the edge of the covert, with the trees knee-deep in fern,
to hear the flies hum angrily within, to find the glade in spring
carpeted with blue-bells--all these sights and sounds took hold of his
childish heart with a deep passion that never left him.
All this life was, in memory, as I have said, a series of vignettes and
pictures; the little dramas of the nursery, the fire that glowed in the
grate, the savour of the fresh-cut bread at meal-times, the games on
wet afternoons, with a tent made out of shawls and chairs, or a fort
built of bricks; these were the pictures that visited Hugh in after
days, small concrete things and sensations; he could trace, he often
thought, in later years, that his early life had been one more of
perception than of anything else; sights and sounds and scents had
filled his mind, to the exclusion of almost all beside. He could
remember little of his relations with those about him; the figures of
the family and servants were accepted as all part of the environment.
The only very real figure was the old nurse, whose rare displeasure he
had sorrowed over more than anything else in the world, and whose
chance words, uttered to another servant and overheard by the child,
that she was thinking of leaving them, had given him a deeper throb of
emotion than anything he had before known, or was for many years to
know.
But the time for the eager and romantic association with other people,
which was to play so large a part in Hugh's life, was not yet come.
People had to be taken as they came, and their value depended entirely
upon their kindness or unkindness. There was no sense of gratitude as
yet, or desire to win affection. If they were kind, they were
unthinkingly and instinctively liked. If they thwarted or interfered
with the child's little theory of existence, his chosen amusements, his
hours of leisure, his loved pursuits, they were simply obstacles round
which his tiny stream of life must find its way as it best could.
There was indeed one other chief delight for the child: the ordered
services of the Church hard by the house. He loved with all his heart
the fallen day, the pillared vault, the high dusty cornices, the
venerable scent; and the services, with their music solemn and sweet,
the postures of the ministers, the faces, clothes, and habits of the
congregation--all was a delightful field of pleasing experience. Yet
religion was a wholly unreal thing to the child. He learnt his Bible
lessons and psalms; he knew the liturgy by heart; but the religious
idea, the thought of God, the Christian life of effort, were all things
that he merely accepted as so many facts that were taught him, but
without the least interest in them, or even the shadowiest attempt to
apply them to his own life. It seemed strange to Hugh when, in years
long after, religion came to have so deep a meaning to him, that it
should have been so entirely a blank to him in the early days. God was
no more to him than a far-off monarch; a mighty and shadowy person,
very remote and powerful, but the circle of whose influence never
touched his own. And yet one of the deepest desires of his father's
mind had been to bring a sense of religion home to his children. Hugh
used to wonder how he had missed it; but the practical application of
religion, to which the Bible lessons had led up, had been to the child
a mere relief from the tension of thought, because at last he had
escaped from the material teaching about which he might be questioned,
and which he would be expected to remember.
Personal relations, then, had scarcely existed for Hugh as a child.
Older and bigger people, armed with a vague authority, had to be
obeyed, and the boy had no theory which could account for their
inconsequent behaviour; they were amiable or ill-humoured, just or
unjust; he never attempted to criticise or condemn them by a moral
standard; he simply accepted them as they were, and kept as much as
possible out of the way of those who manifested sharpness or
indifference. With children of his own age it was in many ways the
same, though there seemed to the boy to be more hope of influencing
their behaviour; threats, anger, promises, compliance could be applied;
but of the affection that simply desired to please the object of its
love, the boy knew nothing. Once or twice he went away from home on a
visit, and because he wept on his departure, he was supposed to have a
tender and emotional nature; but it was not tenderness, at least not
tenderness for others, that made him weep. It was partly the terror of
the unknown and the unfamiliar; it was partly the interruption to the
even tenor of his life and the customary engagements of his day; and in
this respect the boy had what may be called a middle-aged temperament,
an intense dislike of any interference with his own ways; he had no
enterprise, none of the high-hearted enjoyment of novelty, unless he
was surrounded by a bulwark of familiar personalities; but partly, too,
his love was all given to inanimate things; and as he drove out of the
gate on one of these visits, the thought that the larches of the copse
should be putting out their rosy buds, the rhododendrons thrusting out
their gummy, spiky cases, the stream passing slowly through its deep
pools, the bee-hive in the little birch avenue beginning to wake to
life, and that he should not be there to go his accustomed rounds, and
explore all the minute events of his dear domain--it was this that
brought out the tears afresh, with a bitter, uncomforted sense of loss
and bereavement.
So the early years passed for the boy, in a dream full to the brim of
small wonders and fragrant mysteries. How pleasant it was to sink to
sleep on summer evenings with the imagination of voyaging all night in
a little boat or carriage; how delightful to wake, with the morning sun
streaming in at the window, to hear the casement ivy tap on the pane,
and to rehearse in the mind all the tiny pleasures of the long day!
His short lessons were easy enough for the boy; he was quick and acute,
and had a good memory; but he took not the smallest interest in them,
except the interest of making a situation go smoothly; the only
interest was in the thought of the unmolested lonely play that was to
follow. He cared little for games, though they had a certain bitter
excitement, the desire of emulation, the joy of triumph about them. He
loved best an aimless wending from haunt to haunt, an accumulation of
small treasures in places unknown to others; and most of all the rich
sense of observation of a hundred curious and delicate things; the
nests of birds in the shrubbery, the glossy cones of the young pines,
the green, uncurling fingers of the bracken, the fresh green
sword-grass that grew beneath the firs; he did not care to know the
nature or the reasons of these things; it was enough simply to see
them, to explore them with restless fingers, to recognise their scents,
hues, and savours, with the sharp and unblunted perceptions of
childhood.
Then came the intellectual awakening. Hugh's mother, who had an
extraordinary gift for improvisation, began to tell the children
stories in the nursery evenings; and these tales of giants and fairies
grew to have an extreme fascination for the child; not that he peopled
his own world with them, as some imaginative children do; the boy's
perceptions were too definite for that; such beings belonged to a
different region; he had no idea that they existed, or had ever
existed. They belonged to the story world, which was associated in his
mind with bright fires and toys put away, when he nestled as close as
he could to his mother's knee, with her hand in both his own, exploring
every ring and every finger, till he could recall, many years after,
each turn and curve, and even each finger-nail of those dear hands.
And then at last came the supremest joy of all; the children used to be
summoned down to their mother's room, and she began to read aloud
_Ivanhoe_ to them; and then indeed a new world, a world that had really
existed, sprang to light.
Hugh used to wonder afterwards how much he had really understood of
what was read; but the whole thing seemed absolutely alive to him; his
pictorial fancy came into play, and the details of woods and heaths
that he knew so well began to serve him in good stead; and then the
child, who had before thought of reading as merely a tiresome art that
he was forced to practise, found that it was the key that admitted him
into this wonderful world. It did not indeed destroy his relish for
the outer world of nature, for at all hours of the day, when it was
possible to slip out of doors, he went his solitary way, looking,
looking; until every tree and flower-border and thicket of the small
domain became so sharply imprinted upon the mind that, years after, he
could walk in memory through the sunny garden, and recall the minutest
details with an astonishing accuracy.
But books became for the child a large part of his life. It was a
story that he desired, something that should create a scene for him,
personalities like or unlike his own, whose deeds and words he could
survey, leaning, so it seemed to him, from a magic casement into the
new scene. His father, whose taste was for the improving in
literature, was willing enough that the boy should be supplied with
books, but hardly understood that the child was living in a world of
bright fancies and simple dreams. His father, moreover, who had all
his life had a harder and more definite turn of thought, and had
desired knowledge of a precise kind, wanted the boy to read the little
dry books, uncouthly and elaborately phrased, that had pleased himself
in his own early days. Hugh's mind was precise enough; but these terse
biographies, these books of travel, these semi-scientific stories
seemed to Hugh only to relate the things that he did not want to know.
His father had been born at a time when the interest in the education
of children was first taking shape, the days of Miss Edgeworth's
_Frank_, and _Harry and Lucy_, that strange atmosphere of gravity and
piety, when children were looked upon as a serious responsibility more
than as a poetical accessory to life; not as mysterious and fairy-like
creatures, to be delicately wooed and tenderly guided, but rather as
little men and women, to be repressed and trained, and made as soon as
possible to have a sense of responsibility too. Hugh used to look at
the old books in later days, and wonder what the exact social position
of the parents in such books as _Frank_, and _Harry and Lucy_, were
supposed to be. They lived in the country; they were not apparently
wealthy; they lived with much simplicity. Yet Harry's father seemed to
have nothing to do but to conduct his children over manufactories, and
to take them long walks--in the course of which he diligently improved
their minds by a species of Socratic inquiry. But Hugh never thought
of quarrelling with the books provided; he seized upon any trace of
humanity or amusement that they afforded, any symptoms of character and
liveliness, and simply evaded the improving portion, which blew like a
dry wind over his spirit. When his father talked over the books with
the child, he listened tolerantly to the boy's amusement at how the
cake had rolled down the hill, or how the little pig had got into the
garden; but he was disappointed that the boy seemed not to care whether
the stone which Harry threw described a parabola or not, though there
was an odious diagram to explain it, full of dotted lines and curves.
Yet the boy held on his way, deaf to all that did not move him or
interest him, and fixing jealously on all that fed his fancy. Such
books as _Grimm's Fairy Tales_ and _Masterman Ready_ were wells of
delight, enacted as they were in a strange and exciting world; and he
was sensitive, too, to the beauty of metre and sonorous phrases,
learning poetry so easily that it was supposed to be a species of
wilfulness in him that the Collects and texts, and the very
Psalms--that seemed to him so unreal and husk-like then, and that later
became to him like fruits full of refreshment and savour and sweet
juices--found their way so slowly into his memory, and were so easily
forgotten.
II
The Schoolmaster--School Life--Companions
The time came for Hugh to go to school. He drifted, it seemed to him
afterwards, with a singular indifference and apathy of mind, into the
new life, though the parting from home was one of dumb misery; not that
he cared deeply, as a softer-hearted child might have cared, at being
parted from his father, his mother, his sisters. People, even those
nearest to the boy, were still only a part of the background of life, a
little nearer perhaps, but hardly dearer, hardly more important than
trees and flowers, except that a greater part of his life was spent
with them. But the last afternoon in the familiar scene--it was a hot,
bright September day--tried the boy's fortitude to the uttermost. He
felt as though the trees and walks would almost miss his greeting and
presence--and what was the saddest part of all to him was that he could
not be sure of this. Was the world that he loved indifferent to him?
Did it perhaps not heed him, not even perceive him? He had always
fancied that these trees and flowers had a species of sight, that they
watched him, the trees shyly out of their green foliage, the flowers
with their bright unshrinking gaze. The tallest trees seemed to look
down on him from a height, regarding him with a dignified and quiet
interest; his personal affection for them had led him indeed to be
careful not to ill-use them; he had always disliked the gathering of
flowers, the tearing off of boughs or leaves from shrubs. They seemed
to suffer injury patiently, but none the less did he think that they
were hurt. He liked to touch the full-blown heads of the roses, when
they yielded their petals at a touch into his hand, because it seemed
that they gave themselves willingly. And then too, when the big china
bowl that stood in the hall was full of them, and they were mixed with
spices, the embalming process seemed to give them a longer and a fuller
life.
But now he was leaving all this; day after day the garden would bloom,
until the autumn came, and the trees showered down their golden leaves
on walk and lawn. He had seen it year after year, and now he would see
it no more. Would they miss him as he would miss them? And so the
last afternoon was to him a wistful valediction; he went softly about,
to and fro, with a strange sadness at his heart, the first shadow of
the leave-takings of the world.
The school to which he went was a big place in the suburbs of London,
standing near a royal park. The place was full of dignified houses,
standing among trees and paddocks, with high blank garden-walls
everywhere. The school itself had been once a great suburban mansion,
the villa of a statesman. The rooms were large, high, and dignified,
but the bareness of life, under the new conditions, was a great trial
to the boy. He had a certain luxuriousness of temperament, not in
matters of meat and drink, but in the surroundings and apparatus of
life. The bare, uncurtained, uncarpeted rooms, the big dormitory with
its cubicles, the stone-flagged passages, all appeared to him mean and
sordid. His schoolmaster was a man of real force of character, a tall
stately personage, with a great enthusiasm for literature, a fine
converser and teacher, and with a deep insight into character. But
this was marred by a want of tenderness, a certain harshness of
disposition, and a belief that boys needed to be repressed and
dragooned. Hugh conceived an overwhelming terror for this majestic
man, with the dress and bearing of a fine gentleman, with his flashing
eyes, his thin lips, his grey curly hair, his straggling beard. He was
a friend of Hugh's father, and took a certain interest in the boy,
especially when he discovered that, though dreamy and forgetful, Hugh's
abilities were still of a high order. His work was, in fact, always
easy to him, though he was entirely destitute of ambition. Certain
scenes impressed themselves on the boy's mind with extraordinary
vividness. Mr. Russell, the schoolmaster, used to read out every week
a passage for the boys to turn into verse. He read finely, and Hugh
noticed, with a curious surprise, that Mr. Russell was almost
invariably affected to tears by his reading. But, on the other hand, a
scene which he saw, when he and certain other boys were waiting to have
their exercises looked over, was for years a kind of nightmare to him.
There was a slow and stupid boy in the class, whom Mr. Russell chose to
consider obstinate, and who was severely caned, in the presence of the
others, for mistakes in his exercise. Even ten years after, Hugh could
remember with a species of horror the jingling of the keys in Mr.
Russell's pocket, as he took them out to unlock the drawer where the
cane lay. Perhaps this proved a salutary lesson for Hugh, for the
terror that such an incident might befall himself, caused him to take
an amount of trouble over his exercises which he would certainly not
otherwise have bestowed.
On Sunday evenings Mr. Russell read aloud to the upper boys in his
drawing-room; and this was a happy time for Hugh; he loved to sit in a
deep chair, and feast his eyes upon the pictures, the china, the warm
carpet and curtains of the fire-lit room, and the books that he heard
read had a curious magic for him. Mr. Russell never seemed to take any
particular notice of him, and Hugh used to feel that he was despised
for his want of _savoir faire_, his slovenliness, his timidity; and it
was a great surprise to discover, long after, a bundle of letters from
Mr. Russell to his father, in which he found his abilities and
shortcomings discussed with extraordinary penetration.
Hugh played no games at his school; there was not then the organisation
of school games which has since grown up. His favourite occupation was
wandering about the big grounds, to which certain boys were admitted,
or joining in the walks, which a dozen boys, conducted by a peevish or
good-tempered usher, as the case might be, used to take in the
neighbourhood of the school. The high garden-walls, with the
mysterious posterns, the huge horse-chestnuts looking over the leaded
tops of the classical arbours with which the grounds of an adjacent
villa were adorned; the great gate-posts of the main entrances, the
school-house itself, looking grimly down from a great height, all these
held strange mysteries for the boy, sinking unconsciously into his
spirit.
But he made very few friends either with masters or boys. He had none
of the merry sociability of childhood; he confided in no one, he simply
lived his life reluctantly, hating the place, never sure that some ugly
and painful punishment, some ridicule or persecution might not fall on
him out of a clear sky for some offence unconsciously committed. He
had hardly a single pleasant memory connected with the school, except
of certain afternoons when the boys who had done well for the week were
allowed to go without supervision to the neighbouring shops, and
purchase simple provender. But if he made no friends, he at least made
no enemies; he was always friendly and good-tempered, and he was
preserved by his solitariness from all grossness and evil. It was a
big school, and occasionally he perceived in the talk and behaviour of
his companions the signs of some ugly and obscene mystery that he did
not understand, and that he had no wish to penetrate. But the result,
which in after days surprised him with a sense of deep gratitude and
thankfulness, was, that though he spent two years at this school, he
left it with absolutely untainted innocence, such innocence as in later
days he would have held to be almost inconceivable, as to all the
darker temptations of the senses. But the absence of close human
relationship was the strange thing. He had a few boys with whom he
associated in a familiar way. But he had no idea of the homes from
which they came, he knew nothing of their inner taste and fancies. And
though his own feelings and interests were definite enough and even
strong, though he read books of all kinds with intense avidity, he
never spoke of them to other boys, while at the same time he was averse
to writing letters home; his father complained once in the holidays
that he knew nothing of what the boy did at school. Hugh could not put
into words what he felt to be the truth, namely, that he hardly knew
himself. He submitted quietly and obediently to the dull routine of
the place, and felt so little interest in it, that he could not
conceive that his father should do so either. There were of course
occasional exciting incidents, but to relate them would have required
so much explanation, such a list of personages, such a description of
circumstances, that he felt unable to embark upon it. His father asked
him whether he would not like some of his school friends to visit him
at home, and he rejected the suggestion with a kind of incredulous
horror. The thought of invading the sanctity, the familiarity of home,
with the presence of a boy who might reveal its secrets to others, was
too appalling to face; it hardly occurred to him that the boys had
homes of their own, places which they loved. He only thought of them
as figures on the school stage, to be conciliated, tolerated, lived
with, his only preoccupation being to shield and guard his own heart
and inner life from any intruding influence whatever. He had no desire
ever to see one of the crew again, boys or masters. Some indeed were
preferable to others, but no one could be trusted for an instant; the
only safe course was to make no claim, and to shield oneself as far as
possible against all external influences, all alliances, all
relationships.
Hugh, in after life, could hardly recall the faces of any of his
companions; the only way at the time in which he differentiated them to
himself was that some looked kinder than others--that was the only
thing that mattered. Thus the years dragged themselves along, the
school-time hated with an intensity of dislike, the holidays eagerly
welcomed as a return to old pursuits. The boy used to lie awake in the
big dormitory in the early summer mornings, thinking with vague terror
and disquiet of the ordered day of labour that lay before him. There
were peacocks kept in the grounds, whose shrill feminine screams of
despairing reproach were always inseparably connected with the
dreariness of the place. His last morning at the school he woke early,
full of joyful excitement, and heard the familiar cries with a thankful
sense that he would never hear them again. He said no good-byes, made
no farewell visits. He waved his hand, as he drove away, in merry
derision at the grim high windows that looked down on the road, the
only thought in his mind being the feeling of unconquerable relief that
the place would see him no more.
He used to wonder, in after days, whether this could have been avoided;
whether it was a wholesome discipline for a child of his age and his
perhaps peculiar temperament to have been brought up under these
conditions. After all, it is the case of the average boy that has to
be considered, and for the average boy, insouciant, healthy-minded,
boisterous, there is probably little doubt that the barrack-life of
school has its value. Probably too for Hugh himself, though it did not
in any way develop his intellect or his temperament, it had a real
value. It taught him a certain self-reliance; it showed him that what
was disagreeable was not necessarily intolerable. What Hugh needed to
make him effective was a certain touch of the world, a certain
hardness, which his home life did not tend to develop. And thus this
bleak and uncheered episode of life gave him a superficial
ordinariness, and taught him the need of conventional compliance with
the ways of the mysterious, uninteresting world.
III
The Public School--Friendships--The Opening Heart--The Mould--The Last
Morning
The change was accomplished, and Hugh went to a public school. In
later life, conscious as he became of the strain and significance of
personal relations with others, he used to wonder at the careless
indifference with which he had entered the big place which was to be
his home for several years, and was to leave so deep a mark upon him.
In his mature life, in the case of the official positions he was
afterwards to hold, unimportant though they were, the thought of his
relations to those with whom he was to work, the necessity of adapting
himself to their temperaments, of establishing terms of intercourse
with them, used to weigh on his mind for many days before the work
began. But here, he reflected, where life was lived on so much closer
terms, when the words and deeds, the feelings and fancies of the boys,
among whom he was to live, were of the deepest and most vital
importance, he entered upon the new life, dull and careless, without
interest or excitement, simply going because he was sent, just dumbly
desirous of ease and tranquillity. He had been elected on to the
foundation of an ancient school, and the surroundings of the new place
did indeed vaguely affect him with a sort of solemn pleasure. The
quaint mediaeval chambers; the cloisters, with their dark and
mysterious doorways; the hall, with its high timbered roof and stained
glass; the huge Tudor chapel, with its pure white soaring lines; the
great organ, the rich stall-work, and the beautiful fields with their
great elms--all this gave him a dim delight. He was taken to school by
his father, who was full of affection, hope, and anxiety. But it
seemed to Hugh, with the curiously observant power that he already
possessed, though he could not have put it into words, that his father,
rather than himself, was experiencing the emotion that it would have
been appropriate for him to have felt. His father was disappointed
that Hugh did not seem more conscious of membership, of the dignity and
greatness of the place. His tender care about the books, the pictures,
and the furnishing of Hugh's little room, did indeed move the boy to a
certain gratitude. But his father's way on such occasions was to order
what he himself would have liked, and his taste was severe; and then he
demanded that the boy should not only accept, but enthusiastically
like, what was given him. Hugh's immature taste was all for what was
bright and fanciful; his father's for what was grave and dignified; and
thus though the boy was glad to have pictures of his own, he had rather
that they had not been engravings of old religious pictures; and he
would have preferred dainty china objects, such as candlesticks and
ornaments, to the solid metal fittings which his father gave him. When
they parted, his father gave him a serious exhortation to which the
child hardly listened. He set him on his guard against certain
temptations, when Hugh was ignorant of what he was alluding to; and the
emotion with which the boy took leave of his father was rather of envy
that he was returning to the dear home life, than regret at being
parted from him.
The first two years of the boy's school life passed like a bewildered
dream; he had a companion or two, but hardly a friend; he had little
idea of what was going on in the big place round him; he was not in the
least ambitious of distinction either in work or games; his one desire
was not to be conspicuous in any way. He was now a shy, awkward
creature; but as he was good-humoured enough, and as his performances
excited no envy in any of his companions, he was left to a great extent
to his own devices. The masters with whom he was brought into contact
he regarded with a distant awe; it never occurred to him that they took
any interest in their work or in the characters of the boys they dealt
with. He supposed vaguely that they liked to show their power by
scoring under the mistakes in exercises, and by setting punishments.
But they were all dim and inhuman beings to him. Only very gradually
did it dawn upon the boy that he had a place in a big society. He was
habitually unsuccessful in examinations, but he became a proficient in
football, which gave him a certain small consequence. He began to give
thought to his clothes, and to adopt the customary tone of talk, not
because he felt in sympathy with it, but because it was a convenient
shield under which he could pursue his own ideas. But his tastes were
feeble enough; he spent hours in the great school library, a cool
panelled room, and though he had no taste for anything that was hard or
vigorous, he read an immense amount of poetry and fiction. He began,
too, to write poetry, with extraordinary precautions that his
occupation should not be discovered. He was present on one occasion
when a store of poems, the work of a curious and eccentric boy of his
own age, was discovered in the drawer of a bureau. These were solemnly
read aloud by a small tormentor, while the unhappy author, writhing
with shame and misery, was firmly held in a chair, and each composition
received with derisive comments and loud laughter. Hugh had joined, he
remembered with a sense of self-reproach, in the laughter and the
criticisms, though he felt in his heart both interest in and admiration
for the poems. But he dare not so far brave ridicule as to express his
feelings, and simply fell, tamely and ungenerously, into the general
tone. He did indeed make feeble overtures afterwards to the author,
which were suspiciously and fiercely repelled, and the only practical
lesson that Hugh learnt from the scene was to conceal his own literary
experiments with a painful caution.
But as the years passed there came a new influence into Hugh's life.
He had always been observant, in his quiet way, of other boys, and at
last, as his nature developed, he began to idealise them in a romantic
way. The first object of his admiration was a boy much older than
himself, an independent, graceful creature, who had a strong taste for
beautiful things, and adorned his room with china and pictures; he was
moreover a contributor of verses to the school magazine, which seemed
to Hugh models of elegance and grace. But he was far too shy to think
of attracting the notice of his hero. It simply became an intense
preoccupation to watch him, in chapel or hall; it was a fearful joy to
meet him, and he used to invent excuses for passing his room, till he
knew the very ornaments and pictures by sight. That room seemed to him
a kind of sacred shrine, where a bright being lived a life of high and
lofty intellectual emotion. But he never succeeded in exchanging a
word with the object of his admiration, except on a certain day, marked
in his calendar long after with letters of gold. There was a regatta
in the neighbourhood of the school, to which the boys were allowed to
go under certain conditions. He had gone, and had spent his day in
wandering about alone, until the glare and the crowd had brought on a
headache; and he had resolved to return home by an early train. He
went to the station, hoping that he might be unobserved, and stepped
into an empty carriage. Just as the train started, he heard rapid
steps; the door was flung open, and his hero entered. Seeing a junior
boy of his own house in the carriage, he made some good-natured remark,
and before Hugh could realise the greatness of his good fortune, his
hero had sate down beside him, and after a few words, with a friendly
impulse, had launched into a ghost story which lasted the whole of the
journey, and the very phrases of which haunted Hugh's mind for weeks.
They had walked down from the station together, but alas for the
vicissitudes of human affairs, his god, contented with having shown
courteous kindness to a lonely and uninteresting small boy, never gave
him for the rest of the school term, after which he left, the slightest
sign of recognition; and yet for years after the fields and trees and
houses which they had passed on the line were suffused for Hugh with a
subtle emotion in the memory of that journey.
And then, a little later than this, Hugh had the first and perhaps the
most abiding joy of his life. A clever, ambitious, active boy of his
own standing, whom he had long secretly admired, took a pronounced
fancy to him. He was a boy, Hugh saw afterwards, with a deeply jealous
disposition; and the first attraction of Hugh's friendship had been the
fact that Hugh threatened his supremacy in no department whatever.
Hugh was the only boy of the set who had never done better than he in
anything. But then there came in a more generous feeling. Hugh's
heart awoke; there was nothing which it was not a pleasure to do for
his friend. He would put anything aside, at any moment, to walk, to
talk, to discharge little businesses, to fetch and carry, to be in
attendance. Moreover, Hugh found his tongue, but his anxiety to retain
his friend's affection made him astonishingly tactful and discreet. He
was always ready to sympathise, to enter into any suggestion; he
suppressed himself and his own tastes completely and utterly; and he
found too, to his vast delight, that he could be entertaining and
amusing. The books he had read, the fiction with which he had crammed
himself, his keen eye for idiosyncrasies and absurdities, all came to
his assistance, and he was amply repaid by a smile for his trouble.
The two boys became inseparable, and perhaps the thing that made those
days of companionship bright with a singular and golden brightness, was
that there was in his friend the same fastidious vein, the same dislike
of any coarseness of talk or thought which was strong in Hugh. Looking
back on his school life, with all the surprising foulness of the talk
of even high-principled boys, it was a deep satisfaction to Hugh to
reflect that there had never been in the course of this friendship a
single hint, so far as he could recollect, in their own intercourse
with each other, of the existence of evil. They had tacitly ignored
it, and yet there had not been the least priggishness about the
relationship. They had never inquired about each other's aspirations
or virtues, in the style of sentimental school-books. They had never
said a word of religion, nor had there ever been the smallest
expression of sentiment. All that was taken for granted. It was
indeed one of those perfect, honest, wholesome companionships, which
can only exist between two cheerful boys of the same age. Hugh indeed
was conscious of a depth of sacred emotion, too sacred to be spoken of
to any one, even to be expressed to himself. It was not, in fact, a
definite relation which he represented to himself; it was rather like a
new light shed abroad over his life; incidents had a savour, a sharp
outline which they had lacked before. He became conscious, too, of the
movement and intermingling of personal forces, of characters. He no
longer had the purely spectatorial observation of others which had
distinguished him before, but beheld other personalities, as in a
mirror, in the mind of his friend. And then, too, what was a far
deeper joy, literature and poetry began to yield up their secrets to
him. Poetry had been to him before, a gracious, soulless thing like a
tree or a flower, and had been apprehended purely in its external
aspect. But now he suddenly saw the emotion that burnt beneath, not
indeed of the love that is mingled with desire--that had still no
meaning for the soul of the boy, or only the significance of a far-off
mystery; but he perceived for the first time that it was indeed
possible to hold something dearer than oneself, one's country, one's
school, one's friend--something large and strong, that could intervene
between one's hopes and oneself.
Hugh was indeed not yet, if ever, to learn the force of these large
words--patriotism, honour, self-surrender, public spirit; he remained
an individualist to the end. His country never became for him the
glowing reality that it means for some. It was dear because his
friends, who were also Englishmen, were dear; and his school for the
same reason. If he had a friend in the School Eleven Hugh would always
rather that his friend should be distinguished than that the school
should win. He could not disentangle the personal fibre, or conceive
of an institution, a society, apart from the beings of which it was
composed.
But his friendship broke in pieces, once and for all, the dumb
isolation in which he had hitherto lived. It opened for him the door
of a larger and finer life, and his soul, endowed with a new
elasticity, seemed to leap, to run, to climb, with a freshness and
vigour that he had never before so much as guessed at.