his life realised what it meant to be free. He woke day after day to
the sensation that he had no engagements, no ties; that he could
arrange his hours of work and liberty as he liked, go where he would;
that no one would question his right, interfere with his independence,
or even take the least interest in his movements. His freedom was at
first, to his dismay, something of a burden to him; he had been used to
ceaseless interruptions, multifarious engagements; the one struggle,
the one preoccupation, had been to win a few hours for solitude, for
reflection, for literary work. But now that the whole of time was at
his disposal, he found himself unable to concentrate his mind, to apply
himself. He had several friends at Cambridge; but the strain of making
new acquaintances, of familiarising himself with the temperaments and
the tastes of the new set of personalities, was very great. It was
impossible for Hugh to enter upon neutral, civil, colourless relations.
He could not meet a man or a woman without endeavouring to find some
common ground of sympathy and understanding. And this was made more
difficult to him at Cambridge by the swift monotony in which the years
had flowed away. Time seemed to have stood still there in those twenty
years. Many of the men that he remembered seemed still to be there,
contentedly pursuing the customary round, circulating from their rooms
to Hall, from Hall to Combination-room, and back again. Thus Hugh,
picking up the thread where he had laid it down, appeared to himself to
be youthful, inexperienced, insignificant; while to those who made his
acquaintance he seemed to be a grave and serious man of affairs, with a
standing in the world and a definite line of his own.
Thus the first months were months of some depression. Not that he
would have gone back if he could, or that he ever doubted of the
wisdom, the inevitableness of the step; even in moments of dejection it
cheered him to feel that he was not eating his heart out in fruitless
work, or solemnly performing a duty, which relied for seriousness upon
its outer place in a settled scheme, rather than upon any intrinsic
value that it possessed. But his life soon settled down into a steady
routine. He gave his morning to letters, business, and reading; his
afternoons to exercise, his evenings to writing and academical
sociabilities. His aim began gradually to be to make the most of the
sacred hours of the late afternoon, when his mind was most alert, and
when he seemed to possess the easiest mastery of language. He
consecrated those hours to his chosen work, and it was his object to
fit himself, as by a species of training, to make the most and best of
that good time, which lay like gold among the debris of the day. It
seemed to him that the solid, unimaginative work of the morning cleared
away a certain heaviness and sluggishness of apprehension, which was
the shadow of sleep; that the open air, the active movement of the
afternoon, removed the clumsier and grosser insistence of the body; and
that there resulted a frame of mind, when the imagination was lively
and alert, and when the willing brain served out its stores with a
cordial rapidity. There was a danger perhaps of selfish absorption in
such a scheme of life; but at least no artist ever more sedulously
cultivated the best and most fruitful conditions for the practice of
his art. Hugh grew to have an almost morbid sense of the value of
time. Interruptions, social entertainments, engagements which
interfered with his programme, he resented and resolutely avoided. He
became indeed aware that other people, to whom the value of his work
was not apparent, were apt to regard the jealous arrangement of his
hours as the mere whim of a self-absorbed dilettante. But that
troubled Hugh little, because he realised that his only hope of doing
sound and worthy work lay in making a sacrifice of the ordinary and
trifling occupations of life, of forming definite habits, for the want
of which so many capable and brilliant persons sink into
unproductiveness.
Yet the life had a danger which Hugh did not at first perceive. It
tended to concentrate his thoughts too much upon himself. His writings
took on a personal colour, a warm, self-regarding light, of which his
candid friends did not hesitate to make him aware. The bitterness of
the slow progress of a book, and of the long time that must elapse
between its execution and its appearance, is that the readers of it
tend to consider that it reflects the exact contemporary thought of its
writer. Hugh's mind and personality grew fast in those days; and by
the time that his friends were criticising a book as the outcome of his
immediate thought, he was feeling himself that it was but a milestone
on the road, marking a spot that he had left leagues behind him.
But the creative instinct, which had struggled fitfully with the hard
practical conditions of his professional life, now took a sudden bound
forward. His writing became the one important thing in the world for
Hugh. He had gained, he found, through constant practice, dry as the
labour had been, a considerable fluency and firmness of touch: now
sentences shaped themselves under his hand like living things; words
flowed easily from their abundant reservoir. Yet the peril, which he
soon grew to perceive, was that his outfit of emotional experience, his
knowledge of human life in its breadth and complexity, was very narrow
and limited. He had seen life only under a single aspect, and that an
aspect which, poignant and intense as it was, did not easily lend
itself to artistic treatment. The result was that his outlook was a
narrow one, and his mind was driven back upon itself. The need to
speak, to express, to shape thoughts in appropriate words, so long
repressed, so instinctive to him, became almost fearfully imperative.
He was haunted by a hundred ardent speculations in art, in literature,
in religion, in metaphysics, all of a vague rather than a precise kind.
His mind had been always of a loose, poetical type, turning to the
quality of things rather than to outward facts or practical questions.
Temperaments, individualities, appealed to him more than national
movements or aspirations; and then the old love of nature came back
like a solemn passion.
This sudden growth of egotism and introspection tended to alarm and
disquiet Hugh's friends; they put it down to his severance from
practical activities, and began to fear a morbid and self-regarding
attitude. Yet Hugh knew that it would right itself; it was but the
completion of a process, begun in his college days, and checked by his
early entry into professional life; it was a return of his youth, the
natural fulfilment of that period of speculative thought, which a young
man must pass through before he can put himself in line with the world.
And in any case it was inevitable; and Hugh was content as before to
leave himself in the hand of God, only glad at least that a process
which would naturally have been finished under the overshadowing of the
melancholy of youth, could thus be worked out with the temperate
tranquillity, the serenity of manhood.
VIII
Foundations of Faith--Duality--Christianity--The Will of God
After all the inevitable bustle, the moving and settling of furniture,
the constant noting of small needs, the conferences with tradesmen, all
the details inseparable from establishing a new home, had died away,
Hugh found himself, as has been said, for the first time in his life in
comparative solitude. He had a few old friends in Cambridge; but
unless two men are members of the same college, meetings, in a place of
many small engagements, have to be deliberately arranged. Hugh could
always go and dine in the hall of his college, and be certain of
finding there a quiet good-fellowship and a pleasant tolerance. But he
had not as yet mastered the current of little incidents which furnish
so much of the conversation of small societies: allusions to facts
familiar to all beside himself were perpetually being made; and he knew
that nothing is so tiresome as a would-be sympathetic questioner, who
does not understand the precise lie of the ground. He had as yet no
definite work; a literary task in which he was shortly to be engaged
had not as yet begun; the materials had not been placed in his hands.
Thus compelled by circumstances to pass through a period of enforced
retreat, Hugh resolved upon a certain course of action. He determined
to put down in writing, for his own instruction and benefit, the
precise position he held in thought--his hopes, his desires, his
beliefs. He set to work, it must be confessed, in a melancholy mood,
the melancholy that is inseparable from the position of a man who has
lived a very full and active life, and from whom the burden of
activities is suddenly lifted. Though the lifting of the weight was an
immense relief, and though he could often summon back cheerfulness by
reflecting how entire his freedom was, and how troublesomely he would
have been occupied if he had still held his professional position, yet
the mere fact that there was no longer any necessity to brace his
energies and faculties to meet some particular call of duty, gave him
spaces of a flaccid dreariness, in which his accustomed literary work
palled on him; one could not read or write for ever; and so he set
himself, as I have said, to compose a memorandum, a _symbol_, so to
speak, of his moral and intellectual faith.
He was surprised, as soon as he began his task, to find how much of
what he had believed to be certainties shrank and dwindled. A perfect
sincerity with himself was the only possible condition under which such
a work was worth undertaking. A sincerity which should resolutely
discard all that was merely traditional and customary, should emphasise
nothing, should regard nothing as proved, in which hope outran
scientific certainty.
He found then that his creed began with a deep and abiding faith in
God; he believed, that is, in the existence of an all-pervading,
all-powerful Will, lying behind and in the scheme of things.
Side by side with this belief, and inextricably interwoven with it, was
his belief in his own identity and personality. That was perhaps the
only thing of which he was ultimately assured. But his experience of
the world was that it was peopled by similar personalities, each of
whom seemed equally conscious of a separate existence, who were swayed
by motives similar in kind, though differing in detail, from the
motives which swayed himself; beyond these personalities, lay whole
ranges of sentient beings, which sank at last, by slow and minute
gradations, into matter which seemed to him to be inanimate; but even
all this was permeated by certain forces, themselves unseen, but the
symptoms of which were apparent in all directions, such as heat,
motion, attraction, electricity. He believed it possible that all
these might be different manifestations and specimens of the same
central force; but it was nothing more than a vague possibility.
He was next confronted with a mysterious fact. In every day and hour
of his own life he was brought face to face with a double experience.
At moments he felt himself full of life, health, and joy; at other
moments he felt himself equally subject to torpor, _malaise_, and
suffering. What it was that made these two classes of experience clear
to him he could not tell; but there was no questioning the fact that at
times he was the subject of experience of a pleasant kind, which he
would have prolonged if he could; while at times he was equally
conscious of experiences which his only desire was to terminate as
speedily as possible.
This mystery, which no philosopher had ever explained, seemed to him to
run equally through the whole of nature. He asked himself whether he
was in the presence of two warring forces. Would the Will, whatever it
was, which produced happiness, have made that happiness permanent, if
it could? was it thwarted by some other power, perhaps equally
strong--though it seemed to Hugh that the happiness of most sentient
beings decidedly and largely predominated over their unhappiness--a
power which was deliberately inimical to joy and peace, health and
well-being?
It seemed to him, however, that the two were so inextricably
intermingled, and so closely ministered, the one to the other, that
there was an essential unity of Will at work; and that both joyful and
painful experiences were the work of the same mind. He therefore
rejected at the outset the belief that what was commonly called evil
could be a principle foreign to the nature of the Will of God; and he
put aside as childish the belief that evil is created by the faculty of
human choice, setting itself against the benevolent Will of God; for
benevolence thus hampered would at once become a mere tame and
ineffective desire for the welfare of sentient things, and be wholly
deprived of all the attributes of omnipotence. Besides, he saw the
same qualities that produced suffering in humanity, such as the
instincts of cruelty, lust, self-preservation, manifesting themselves
with equal force among those sentient creatures which did not seem to
be capable of exercising any moral choice.
But in regarding nature, as revealed by the researches of scientists,
he saw that there was a slow development taking place, a development of
infinite patience and almost insupportable delay. Finer and finer
became the organisation of animal life; and in the development of human
life, too, he saw a slow progress, a daily deepening power of
organising natural resources to gratify increasingly complicated needs.
Not only was an energy at work, but a progressive energy, bringing into
existence things that were not, and revealing secrets unknown before.
He next attempted to define his moral belief; and here, too, he saw in
the world a progressive force at work. He saw society becoming more
and more refined, more desirous to amend faulty conditions, more
anxious to alleviate pain; and this not only with self-regarding
motives, but with a vital sympathy, which reached its height in the
deliberate purpose of many individuals that, even if condemned to
suffer themselves, they would yet spend thought and energy in
relieving, if possible, the ills of others.
He saw in the teaching of Christ what appeared to be the purest and
simplest attempt ever made to formulate unselfish affection. No
teacher of morals had ever reached the point of inculcating upon men
the belief that it was the highest joy to spend the energies of life in
contributing to the happiness of others. Though he saw in the system
of Christ, as popularised and interpreted, a whole host of insecure
assumptions, unverified assertions, and even degrading traditions, yet
he could not doubt of the Divine force of the central message. If he
was not in a position to affirm with certitude the truth of the
recorded events which attended the origin of the Christian revelation,
he could yet affirm with confidence that in the teaching of Christ a
higher range of emotion had been reached than had ever been approached
before; and he saw that spirit, in countless regions, however slowly,
leavening the thought, the instincts of the world. The question then
resolved itself into a practical one. How in his own life was he to
make the serenity, the happiness which he desired, predominate over the
suffering, the discontent to which he was liable? Could it be done by
an effort of mind? His professional life had shown him that activity
had not brought him any peace of mind, principally because the system
which he was bound to serve demanded such immense expense of labour for
purely unprofitable ends. It had not been part of the humble and
necessary work of the world, which must be done by some one, if human
beings are to live at all; it had only been the outcome of the
needlessly elaborate life of a highly organised community. It had
filled his life full of a futile intellectual toil. And then, the
effect upon his own character had been to hamper and stunt his natural
energies. It had given him false ideals and wrong motives.
Looking back at his own life, Hugh saw that ambition, in one form or
another, had poisoned his spirit. He saw that the instinct to gain a
supremacy at the expense of others had been the one serious motive
pressed upon him from first to last; indeed the necessity for moral
control had been really, though not nominally, urged upon him, on the
ground that by yielding to bodily desires he would be likely to
frustrate his visions of success. Only of late had he had any
suspicion of the truth, that gentleness, peacefulness, kindness,
sincerity, quiet toil, activity of body and mind, were the things that
really made life sweet and joyful. Had he learned it too late to be
able to exorcise the demons that had so long harboured in his soul? He
feared so.
But at last, after long pondering, he arrived at his decision, which
was that if indeed this vast and patient Will was in the background of
all, the only way was to follow it, to lean upon it; above all things
not to be distracted by the conventions of society, which, though they
too, in a sense, had their origin in the Will of God, yet were things
to be left behind, to be struggled out of. There might indeed be some
natures to which such things were attractive and satisfying, but Hugh
had no doubt that though they might attract him, they could not satisfy.
And yet over his thoughts there brooded the shadow of the sad
possibilities that lay in wait for him, and of which he had already
felt the touch--pain, weariness, a discontented mind, jealousy,
despair, and at the end of all death, which closed the prospect
whichever way he looked. But if these things too were of the very
nature of God, His Will indeed, though obscure and terrible, the only
way was in a patient and loving submission, a knowledge that they could
not be wholly in vain; and so he resolved that his life should be even
so; that he would embrace all opportunities of showing kindness, giving
help to others; that he would live a simple life of labour, using his
faculties to the uttermost, as God should provide; and that his whole
being should be a deliberate prayer that he might do the Will of God as
affected himself, without seeking the praise or recognition of men. He
foresaw indeed much solitude, much weariness. God had never given him
one whom he could unreservedly love, though He had sent him abundance
of pure and noble friendships. Quiet dependence upon God, simplicity
of life, a readiness to serve, a strenuous use of the gifts given to
him; that was the faith in which Hugh, now late in life, and after what
profitless squandering of energies, began his pilgrimage.
IX
Art--The End of Art
It seemed strange to Hugh to sit there as he did, in his quiet house
beside the stream, with an active professional life behind him, and
wonder what the next act would be. His time was now filled with an
editorial task which would demand all his energies, or rather a large
part of them; but editorial work, however interesting in itself--and
the interest of his particular work was great--left one part of the
mind unsatisfied; that part of the mind which desired to create some
beautiful thing. Hugh's difficulty was this, that he had no very
urgent message, to use a dignified word, to deliver to the world.
Nowadays, to appeal to the world, it is necessary to do things, it
would seem, in rather a strident way, to blow a trumpet, or wave a
flag, or command an army, or reform a department of state, or control a
railroad. Hugh had neither the power nor the will to write a virile
book or a powerful story, or to take imagination captive. He did not
wish to head a revolt against anything in particular. The day of the
old, grim, sinister tyrannies, he felt, in the western corner of the
world, was over, and the kind of tyranny that vexed his spirit was a
far more secret and subtle distortion of liberty. It was the rule of
conventionality that he desired to destroy, the appetite for luxury,
and power, and excitement, and strong sensation. He would have liked
to do something to win men back to the joys that were within the reach
of all, the joys of peaceful work, and simplicity, and friendship, and
quiet hopefulness. These were what seemed to Hugh to be the staple of
life, and to be within the reach of so many people. And yet he had no
mission. He could only detest the loud voices of the world and its
feverish excitements, with all his heart; and on the other hand he
loved with increasing contentment the gentler and beautiful background
of life, that enacted itself every day in garden and field and wood;
the quiet waiting things, the old church seen over orchards and
cottage-roofs, the deep pool in the reedy river, dreaming its own quiet
dreams, whatever passed in the noisy world. He was sure that those
things would bring peace to many weary spirits, if they could but learn
to love them.
Artists and musicians, Hugh felt, were the happiest of all people; for
they made the beautiful thing that might stand by itself, without need
of comment. The graceful boy or girl that they painted, undimmed by
age and evil experience, looked down at you from the canvas with a pure
and radiant smile, and became as it were a spring of clear water, where
a soul might bathe and be clean. Or the picture of some silent
woodland place, some lilied pool on a golden summer afternoon--how the
peace of it came into the spirit, how it seemed to assure the heart
that God loved beauty best, lavishing it with an unwearied hand, even
where there could be none to behold it but Himself! Then the
musician,--how he wove the airy stuff of sound, so that the pathos of
the world, its heavy mysteries, its sunlit joys, started into life,
embracing the soul, and bidding it not be faithless or blind. These
were the pure gifts of art, the spells before which the dull
conventions of the world, its noise and dust, crumbled into the ugly
ashes that they really were.
Beside those magical secrets the clumsy art of the writer stood
abashed. Those tints, those notes were such definite things; but in
the grosser and more tainted medium with which writers dealt, where so
much depended upon association and point of view, there was so much
less certainty of producing the effect intended, that one faltered and
lost faith. One thing was certain, that it was useless to _search_ for
a mission; the purpose must descend from heaven, as the eagle pounced
on Ganymede, and carry the trembling and awed minister high above the
heads of men. But the only thing that the faithful writer could do was
to map out some little piece of quiet work, make no vast design, seek
for no large sovereignty; and then work patiently on with ever-present
enjoyment, learning his art, gaining skill and mastery over his vast
and complex instrument, till he gained certainty of touch and the power
of saying, with perfect lucidity, with pure transparency of phrase,
exactly what he meant; and then, behind his art, to live resolutely in
his simple creed, whatever article of it he could master, sure of this,
that if his inspiration came, he would be able to present it worthily;
and if it did not come--well, his would have been a grave, quiet,
gracious life, like the life of a song-bird that had never had an
audience, or a stream which dropped in crystal cataracts from unvisited
rocks, upon which no gazer's eye had ever fallen. And so there shaped
itself what must be for the lover of the beautiful the first article of
his faith, the thought that the happiness of art came in the making,
the weighing, the disposing, and not in the recognition of the triumph
by others; and that the temptation to gain a hearing, to touch hearts,
to sway emotions was a natural one enough, but that it must be the
first of all to be discarded, as one set foot in the enchanted world,
among the dim valleys and rock-ridges, the thickets and the plains,
that stretched beyond the sunset and on to the sea's rim,--that wider,
more shadowy, more remote world of awe and mystery which lay so near,
outside the window, at the opening of a door, at the sound of a voice,
the glance of an eye, and in which one's busy fevered life was set,
like the print of the wind's footstep in the crisping wave, on the
surface of some vast unfathomable sea.
X
Retrospect--Renewal of Youth--The New Energy