exclusive companionship of its earlier stages grew less; but it seemed
to Hugh to bring him into new relations with half the world. He became
a boy with many friends. Other boys found his quaint humour, his
shrewd perceptions, his courtesy and gentleness attractive. He took
his new-found popularity with a quiet prudence, a good-humoured
discretion that disarmed the most critical; but it was deeply
delightful to the boy; he seemed to himself to have passed out of the
shadow into the sun and air. Life appeared to be full of gracious
secrets, delightful emotions, excellent surprises; it became a series
of small joyful discoveries. His intellect responded to the stimulus,
and he became aware that he had, in certain directions, a definite
ability of which he had never suspected himself. The only part of his
nature that was as yet dark and sealed was the religious spirit. In a
world so full of interests and beauties, there was no room for God; and
at this period of his life, Hugh, with a blindness which afterwards
amazed him, grew to think of God in the same way that he unconsciously
thought of his father, as a checking and disapproving influence, not to
be provoked, but equally not to be trusted. Hugh had no confidences
with his father; he never felt sure, if he gave way to easy and
unconstrained talk with him, that his father would not suddenly discern
something of levity and frivolity in his pursuits; and this developed
in Hugh a gentle hypocrisy, that was indeed the shadow of his sympathy,
which made him divine what would please his father to talk about. He
found all his old letters after his father's death, arranged and
docketed--the thought of the unexpected tenderness which had prompted
this care filled his eyes with sudden tears--but how unreal they
seemed! There was nothing of himself in them, though they were written
with a calculated easiness of expression which made him feel ashamed.
And it was even the same with his idea of God. He never thought of Him
as the giver of beautiful things, as the inspirer of happy friendships;
he rather regarded Him as the liberal dispenser of disappointments, of
rainy days, of reproofs, of failures. It was natural enough in a place
like a public school, where the masters set the boys an example of
awkward reticence on serious matters. Even Hugh's house-master, a
conscientious, devoted man, who, in the time of expansion, was taken
into the circle of his sincere friendships--even he never said a
serious word to the boy, except with a constrained and official air as
though he heartily disliked the subject.
It is no part of this slender history to trace the outer life of Hugh
Neville. It must suffice to say that, by the time that he rose to the
top of the school, he appeared a wholesome, manly, dignified boy, quiet
and unobtrusive; very few suspected him of taking anything but a simple
and conventional view of the scheme of things; and indeed Hugh's view
at this time was, if not exactly conventional, at least unreflective.
It was his second time of harvest. He had gathered in, in his
childhood, a whole treasure of beautiful and delicate impressions of
nature. Now he cared little for nature, except as a quiet background
for the drama which was proceeding, and which absorbed all his
thoughts. What he was now garnering was impressions of personalities
and characters, the odd perversities that often surprisingly revealed
themselves, the strange generosities and noblenesses that sometimes
made themselves felt. But an English public school is hardly a place
where these larger and finer qualities reveal themselves, though they
are indeed often there. The whole atmosphere is one of decorum,
authority, subordination. Introspection is disregarded and even
suppressed. To be active, good-humoured, sensible, is the supreme
development. Hugh indeed got nothing but good out of his school-days;
the simple code of the place gave him balance and width of view, and
the conventionality which is the danger of these institutions never
soaked into his mind; convention was indeed for him like a suit of
bright polished armour, in which he moved about like a youthful knight.
He left school curiously immature in many ways. He had _savoir faire_
enough and mild literary interests, but of hard intellectual robustness
he had nothing. The studies of the place were indeed not of a nature
to encourage it. The most successful boys were graceful triflers with
ancient literatures; to write a polished and vapid poem of Latin verse
was Hugh's highest accomplishment, and he possessed the power of
reading, with moderate facility, both Latin and Greek; add to this a
slender knowledge of ancient history, a slight savour of mathematics,
and a few vague conceptions of science; such was the dainty
intellectual equipment with which he prepared to do battle with the
great world. But for all that he knew something of the art of dealing
with men. He had learnt to obey and to command, to be deferential to
authority and to exact due obedience, and he had too a priceless
treasure of friendship, of generous emotion, untinged with
sentimentality, that threw a golden light back upon the tall elms, the
ancient towers, the swiftly-running stream. It was to come back to him
in later years, in reveries both bitter and sweet, how inexpressibly
dear the place had been to him; indeed when he left his school, it had
simply transmuted itself into his home,--the Rectory, with its trees
and walks, its narrower circle of interests, having faded quite into
the background.
The last morning at school was filled with a desolation that was almost
an anguish; he had packed, had distributed presents, had said a number
of farewells, each thrilled with a passionate hope that he would not be
quite forgotten, but that he might still claim a little part in the
place, in the hearts so dear to him. He lay awake half the night, and
in the dawn he rose and put his curtain aside, and looked out on the
old buttresses of the chapel, the mellow towers of the college, all in
a clear light of infinite brightness and freshness. He could not
restrain his tears, and went back to his bed shaken with sobs, yet
aware that it was a luxurious sorrow; it was not sorrow for misspent
days; there were carelessnesses and failures innumerable, but no dark
shadows of regret; it was rather the thought that the good time was
over, that he had not realised, as it sped away, how infinitely sweet
it had been, and the thought that it was indeed over and done with, the
page closed, the flower faded, the song silent, pierced the very core
of his heart. One more last thrill of intense emotion was his; his
carriage, as he drove away, surmounted the bridge over the stream; the
old fields with the silent towers behind them lay beneath him, the home
of a hundred memories. There was hardly a yard of it all that he could
not connect with some little incident; the troubles, the unhappinesses,
such as they had been, were gone like a shadow; only the joy remained;
and the memory of those lost joys seemed like a bird beating its wings
in the clear air, as it flew to the shadow of the pines. What was to
follow? he cared little to think; all his mind was bent on the sweet
past. Something of the mystery of life came home to him in that
moment. He would have readily died then, he felt, if a wish could have
brought him death. Yet there was nothing morbid in the thought; it was
only that death seemed for a moment a fitting consummation for the end
of a period that had held a richness and joy that nothing else could
ever hold again.
IV
Undergraduate Days--Strain--Recovery--A First Book
The desire to be returning to school with which Hugh went up to the
university did not last long; he paid a visit to his housemaster, and
saw with a mixture of envy and amusement how his juniors had all
stepped quietly into the places which he and his friends had vacated,
and were enjoying the sensation of influence and activity. He was
courteously treated and even welcomed; but he felt all the time like
the _revenante_ of Christina Rossetti,--"I was of yesterday." And then
too, a few weeks after he had settled at Cambridge, in spite of the
strangeness of it all, in spite of the humiliation of being turned in a
moment from a person of dignity and importance into a mere "freshman,"
he realised that the freedom of the life, as compared with the
barrack-life of school, was irresistibly attractive. He had to keep
two or three engagements in the day, and even about these there was
great elasticity. The independence, the liberty, the kindliness of it
all, came home to him with immense charm. And then, too, the city full
of mediaeval palaces, the quiet dignity, the incomparable beauty of
everything, gave him a deep though partly unconscious satisfaction.
But for the first year he was merely a big schoolboy in mind. The real
change in his mental history dated from his election to a small society
which met weekly, where a paper was read, and a free discussion
followed. Up to this time Hugh's religion had been of a purely
orthodox and sensuous description. He had grown up in an
ecclesiastical atmosphere, and the ritual of Church Services, the
music, the ceremonial, had been all attractive to him. As for the
dogmatic side, he had believed it unquestioningly, just as he had
believed in the history or the science that had been taught him. But
in this society he met young men--and older men too, for several of the
Dons were members--who were rationalists, materialists, and definitely
sceptical. It dawned on his mind for the first time that, while all
other sciences were of a deductive kind, endeavouring to approach
principles from the observation and classification of phenomena, from
the scrutiny of evidence, that theology was a science based on
intuitions, and dependent on assumptions which it was impossible to
test scientifically. The first effect of this was to develop a great
loyalty to his traditions, and almost the first hard thinking he had
ever done was in the direction of attempting to defend his faith on
scientific principles. But the attempt proved fruitless; one by one
his cherished convictions were washed away, though he never owned it,
not even to himself. He was regarded as a model of orthodoxy. He made
friends with a young Fellow of his college, who was an advanced
free-thinker, and set himself to enlighten the undergraduate, whose
instinctive sympathy gave him a charm for older men, of which he was
entirely unconscious. They had many serious talks on the subject; and
his friend employed a kind of gentle irony in undermining as far as he
could the foundations of what seemed to him so irrational a state of
mind. One particular conversation Hugh remembered as vividly as he
remembered anything. He and his friend had been sitting, one hot June
day, in the college garden, then arrayed in all its mid-summer pomp.
They sate near a great syringa bush, the perfume of which shrub in
later years always brought back the scene before him; overhead, among
the boughs of a lime-tree, a thrush fluted now cheerfully, now
pathetically, like one who was testing a gift of lyrical improvisation.
The elder man, wearied by a hard term's work, displayed a certain
irritability of argument. Hugh held tenaciously to his points; and at
last, after a silence, his friend turned to him and said, "Well, after
all, it reduces itself to this; have you an interior witness to the
truth of what you say, which you can honestly hold to be superior to
the exterior evidences of its improbability?" Hugh smiled uneasily,
and conscious that he was saying something which he hoped rather than
knew, said, "I think I have." The older man shrugged his shoulders and
said, "Then I can say no more!"--nor did he ever again revert to the
question, from what Hugh thought was a real generosity and tenderness
of spirit.
All the time Hugh practised a species of emotional religion, attending
the chapel services devoutly, even willingly hearing sermons. There
was a little dark church, in a tiny courtyard hemmed in by houses, and
approached by a narrow passage, served by a Fellow of a neighbouring
college, who preached gentle devotional discourses on Sunday evenings,
to which many undergraduates used to go. These were a great help to
Hugh, because they transferred religion from the intellectual to the
spiritual region; and thus, though he was gradually made aware of the
weakness of his intellectual position, he continued his religious life,
in the hope that the door of a mystery might some day be opened to him,
and that he might arrive, by an inner process, at a conviction which
his intellect could not give him. But here as elsewhere he was swayed
by a species of timidity and caution. While on the one hand his
intellect told him that there was no sure and incontrovertible
standing-ground for the orthodoxy which he professed, yet, on the other
hand, he could not bear to relinquish the chance that certainty might
be found on different lines.
In the middle of these speculations, he suffered a dark experience. He
fell, for the first time in his life, into ill-health. His vitality
and nervous force were great, and though soon depleted were soon
recuperated; but the new and ardent interests of the university had
appealed to him on many sides; he worked hard, took violent exercise,
and filled up every space of time with conversation and social
enjoyment; he had no warning of the strain, except an unaccustomed
weariness, of which he made light, drawing upon his nervous energy to
sustain him; the wearier he grew, the more keenly he flung himself into
whatever interested him, learning, as he thought, that the way to
conquer lassitude was by increased exertions, the feeling of fatigue
always passing off when he once grew absorbed in a subject. He took to
sitting up late and rising early, and he had never seemed to himself
more alert and vigorous in mind, when the collapse came. He was
suddenly attacked, without warning, by insomnia.
One night he went to bed late, and found it difficult to sleep;
thoughts raced through his brain, scenes and images forming and
reforming with inconceivable rapidity; at last he fell asleep, to awake
an hour or two later in an intolerable agony of mind. His heart beat
thick and fast, and a shapeless horror seemed to envelop him. He
struck a light and tried to read, but a ghastly and poisonous fear of
he knew not what, seemed to clutch at his mind. At last he fell into a
broken sleep; but when he rose in the morning, he knew that some
mysterious evil had befallen him. If he had been older and wiser, he
would have gone at once to some sensible physician, and a short period
of rest would probably have restored him; but the suffering appeared to
be of so purely mental a character, that he did not realise how much of
it was physical. For that day and for many days he wrestled with a
fierce blackness of depression, which gradually concentrated itself
upon his religious life; he became possessed by a strong delusion that
it was a punishment sent to him by God for tampering with freedom of
thought, and little by little a deep moral anxiety took hold of him.
He searched the recesses of his heart, and ended by painting his whole
life in the blackest of colours.
In the endeavour to find some degree of peace, he read the Scriptures
constantly, and the marks he made in his Bible against verses which
seemed to hold out hope to him or to plunge him into despair, remained
through the after years as signs of this strange conflict of mind. His
distress was infinitely increased by attending some services at a
Mission which then happened to be proceeding which, instead of
inspiring him with hope, convinced him that his case was past recovery.
For some weeks he tasted, day by day, the dreary bitterness of the cup
of dark and causeless depression, and laboured under an agonising
dejection of spirit. This intensity of suffering seemed to shake his
whole life to its foundation. It made havoc of his work, of his
friendships, of the easy philosophy of his life. He began to learn the
distressing necessity of dissembling his feelings; he endeavoured at
great cost to bear as unconcerned a part as before in simple
festivities and gatherings, while the clouds gathered and the thunder
muttered in his soul. And all the time the answer never came. Wrestle
as he might, there seemed to him an impenetrable barrier between him
and the golden light of God. He learnt in what dark and cold isolation
it is possible for the soul to wander. Slowly, very slowly, the
outlook brightened; a whole range of new emotions opened before him.
The expressions of suffering and sorrow, that had seemed to him before
but touching and beautiful phrases, became clear and vivid. His own
powers of expression became more subtle and rich. And thus, though he
gradually drifted back into a species of spiritual epicureanism, he
always felt grateful for his sojourn in the dark world. He did not
abandon his religious profession, but he became more content to suspend
his judgment. He saw dimly that the mistake he had made was in hoping
for anything of the nature of certainty. He became indeed aware that
the only persons who are indubitably in error, are those who make up
their minds in early life to a theory about God and the world, and who
from that moment admit no evidence into their minds except the evidence
that supports their view. Hugh saw that life must be, for him at all
events, a pilgrimage, in which, so long as his open-mindedness, his
candour, his enthusiasm did not desert him, there were endless lessons
to be learnt by the way. And thus he came back gratefully and wearily
to his old life, his old friendships. His college became to him a very
blessed place; apart from the ordinary social life, from the work and
the games which formed a background and framework in which
relationships were set, he found a new region of desires, impulses,
ideas, through which he wandered at his will.
At this time Hugh could not be said to be happy. The shadows of his
dark moods often hung about him, and he bore in his face the traces of
his suffering. He felt, too, that he had failed in his religious
quest, though side by side with this was the consciousness that he had
been meant to fail. His religious views were a vague Theism, coupled
with a certain tendency to determinism, to which his wanderings had
conducted him. Christian determinism he called it, because though his
old unquestioning view of the historical evidences of Christianity had
practically disappeared, yet his belief in Christian morality as the
highest system that had yet appeared in the world was unshaken. And it
was at this time, just after taking his degree, that he wrote a little
book, a species of imaginary biography which attained, to his surprise,
a certain vogue. The book was an extraordinarily formless and
irrelevant production, written upon no plan, into which he shovelled
all his vague speculations upon life. But its charm was its ingenuous
youthfulness and emotional sincerity; and although he afterwards came
to dislike the thought of the book so much, that at a later date he
bought up and destroyed all the copies of it that remained unsold, yet
for all that it had the value of being a perfectly sincere revelation
of personality, and represented a real, if a sentimental, experience.
The book was severely reviewed, but as it was published anonymously,
this gave Hugh little anxiety; and so he shouldered his burden, and
went out of the sheltered life into the wilderness of the world.
V
Practical Life--The Official World--Drudgery--Resignation--Retirement
There will be no attempt made here to trace in any detail the
monotonous years of Hugh's professional life, because they seemed to
him to have been in one sense lost years; there was at all events no
conscious growth in his soul. His spirit seemed to him afterwards to
have lain, during those years, like a worm in a cocoon, living a blind
life. Externally, indeed, they were the busiest time of his life. He
became a hard-worked official in the Civil Service. He lived in rooms
in London. He spent his day at the office, he composed innumerable
documents, he wrote endless letters; he seemed to himself, in a way, to
be useful; he did not dislike the work, and he found it interesting to
have to get up some detailed case, and to present it as lucidly as
possible. He began his official life with an intention of doing some
sort of literary work as well; but he found himself incapable of any
sustained effort. Still, he continued to write; he did a good deal of
reviewing, and kept a voluminous diary, in which he scribbled anything
that struck him, recording scenes, conversations, impressions of books
and people. This he found was easy enough, but it seemed impossible to
complete anything, or to give it a finished form. However, he acquired
the habit of writing, and gained some facility of expression. His
short holidays were spent either in travel, with some like-minded
companion, or in his quiet country home, where he read a large number
of books, and lived much in the open air. But his progress seemed to
have been purely intellectual. He lost his interest in abstract
problems and in religious matters, which retired to a remote distance,
and appeared to him to be little more than a line of blue hills on a
distant horizon, as seen by a man who goes up and down in a city. He
had visited them once, those hills of hope, and he used to think
vaguely of visiting them again; but meanwhile the impulse and the
opportunity alike failed him.
Yet in another sense he did not consider those days lost. He gained,
he used to feel afterwards, a knowledge of the world, a knowledge of
men, a knowledge of affairs. This contact with realities took from his
somewhat dreamy and reflective temperament its unpractical quality. If
he chose afterwards to leave what is commonly called the world, it was
a deliberate choice, founded on a thorough knowledge of its conditions,
and not upon a timid and awkward ignorance. He did not leave the world
because it frightened or bewildered him, but because he did not find in
it the things of which he was in search. Neither, on the other hand,
did he quit the life of affairs like a weakling or an inefficient
person who had failed in it, and had persuaded himself that
incompetence was unworldliness. Hugh became a remarkably efficient
official, alert, sensible, practical, and prudent. He was marked out
for promotion. He was looked upon as a man who got on well with
inferiors and superiors alike, who could be trusted to do a complicated
piece of business well, who was worth consulting.
Moreover he acquired a very serviceable and lucid style, a power of
clear statement, which afterwards stood him in good stead. His
official work gave him the power of seeing the point, it gave him an
economy of words, an effective briskness and solidity of presentment;
at the same time his literary work prevented him from degenerating into
a mere precis-writer.
It is very difficult to say which of the days of a man's life are
wasted and which are fruitful. It is not necessarily the days in which
a man gives himself up to his chosen work in which he makes most
progress. Sometimes a long inarticulate period, when there seems to a
man to be a dearth of ideas, a mental drought, acts as a sort of
incubation in which a thought is slowly conceived and perfected.
Sometimes a long period of repression stores force at high pressure.
The lean years are often the prelude, even the cause, of the years of
fatness, when the exhausted and overteemed earth has lain fallow and
still, storing its vital juices.
Sometimes, too, a disagreeable duty, undertaken in heaviness and
faithfully fulfilled, rewards one by an increase of mental strength and
agility. A painful experience which seems to drown a man's whole
nature in depression and sadness, to cloud hope and eagerness alike,
can be seen in retrospect to have been a period fertile in patience and
courage.
Hugh did not find his official life depressing, but very much the
reverse. He enjoyed dealing with affairs and with men. He used
sometimes to wonder, half regretfully, half comfortably, at the fading
of his old dreams, in which so much that was beautiful was mingled with
so much that was uneasy. He began indeed to be somewhat impatient of
sentiment and emotion, and to think with a sort of compassion of those
who allowed themselves to be ruled by such motives. He did not exactly
adopt a conventional standard, but he found it easier to live on a
conventional plane, until he even began to be viewed by some of his old
friends as a man who had adopted a conventional view. Hugh indeed
found, in his official life, that the majority of those among whom his
lot was cast, did seem whole-heartedly content to live in a
conventional world and to enjoy conventional successes. Such men, and
they were numerous, never seemed disposed to probe beneath the surface
of things, unless they were confronted by adverse circumstances,
bereavements, or indifferent health; and, under these conditions, their
one aim seemed to be to escape as soon as possible from the region of
discomfort: they viewed reflection as a sort of symptom of failing
vitality. And so Hugh drifted to a certain extent into feeling that
self-questioning and abstract thought were a species of intellectual
ill-health. One arrived at no solution, any more than one did in the
case of a toothache; the one thing to do was to get rid of the
unsatisfactory conditions as swiftly as possible.