interested and surprised to compare the pictures of undergraduate life
drawn there with his own experience of that period. They were
generally related in the form of reminiscences, seen far-off, at the
end of a long perspective of years. It was generally represented as a
period of high enthusiasm, intense energy, eager work, unclouded
happiness. The perception of great problems, noble thoughts, seemed in
these reminiscences to have fallen on chivalrous minds with a deep
natural joy. They recorded hours of matchless talk, ingenuous debate,
brilliant wit, scintillating intellect. Hugh liked to believe that
this was the case, but he often wondered whether it was not all
heightened by retrospect, and whether the radiance of the whole picture
was not merely the radiance of recollected youth. If the picture was a
true one, then the later years of the men whose lives were thus told,
of whom more than one were known personally to Hugh, must have been
years of sad physical and mental decline. There was one person in
particular, an eminent ecclesiastic, who had been a frequent guest at
his father's house, in whom Hugh had never discovered any particular
swiftness of perception, of agility of mind, yet the reminiscences of
whose undergraduate years were given in a vein of high enthusiasm.
This worthy clergyman had seemed, if his memory was to be trusted, to
have been the shining centre of a group whose life threw the life of
young Athens, as represented by Plato, into the shade. The man in
question seemed, in later years, a sturdily built clergyman, slow and
cautious of speech, brusque and even grim of address, sensible, devoted
to commonplace activities, and with a due appreciation of the comforts
and conveniences of life. His conversation had no suggestiveness or
subtlety. He was grumpy in the morning and good-humoured in the
evening. He seemed impatient of new ideas, and endowed with a firm
grasp of conventional and obvious notions.
Hugh's own recollection of his university days was very different, and
yet he had lived in what might be called an intellectual set. There
had been plenty of easy friendship, abundance of lively gossip,
incessant and rather tedious festivities. Men had groaned and grumbled
over their work, played games with hearty conviction, had nourished no
great illusions about themselves and each other, had had few generous
and ardent visions about art, poetry, or humanity; or, if they had,
they had kept them to themselves with a very good show of contented
indifference. There was indeed a little society to which Hugh had
belonged, where books, and not very recondite ideas, of ethical or
moral import, were discussed freely and amiably, without affectation,
and occasionally with a certain amount of animation. But the arguments
engendered were flimsy, inconsequent, and fantastic enough; the
dialectic flashed to and fro, never very convincing, and mostly
intended to aggravate rather than to persuade. Even at the time it had
often appeared to Hugh to be shallow and flimsy. He had seldom heard a
subject debated with any thoroughness or justice, and he had learnt far
more from the preparation of occasional papers framed to initiate a
discussion, than from any discussion that followed. The best thoughts
that Hugh had apprehended in those days had been the thoughts that he
had won from books; his mind had opened rapidly then, in the direction
of a kind of poetical metaphysic, not deep speculation on the ultimate
nature of things, so much as reflection on the more psychological
problems of character and personality. It seemed to Hugh that his own
mind, and the minds of those with whom he had lived, had been a mass of
prejudices, of half-formed and inconsistent theories. None of them had
had any policy into which they fitted the ideas that came to them; but
a new and attractive idea had been seized upon, on its own merits,
without any reference to other theories, or with any desire to
co-ordinate it with other ideas, which were indeed just thrust aside to
make room for the new one.
Hugh's idea of mental progress, in his later years, was the slow
dwelling upon some thought, the quiet application of it to other
thoughts. It seemed an inversion of the ordinary method of progress,
if the biographies that he read were true. Taking the case, for
instance, of the particular man whom Hugh had known, and whose
biography he had studied, he seemed in youth to have been generous,
fearless, candid, and ardent, and life must have been to him a process
of hardening and encrusting with prejudice; he seemed to have begun
with a bright faith in ideas, and to have ended with a dull belief in
organisations. He had begun by being thrilled with the beauty of
virtue, and he had ended by supporting the G.F.S. Hugh's experience
was the exact opposite of this. He had begun, he thought, by being
loaded and burdened with prejudices and stupid notions, acquired he
knew not how; he had not doubted the value of authority, tradition,
usage; as life went on, it seemed to him that he had got rid of his
prejudices one by one, and that he had arrived, at the age of forty, at
valuing sincerity, sympathy, simplicity, and candour, above dogma and
accumulated beliefs. He had begun with a firm faith in systems and
institutions; he had ended by basing all his hopes on the individual.
He had begun by looking for beauty and perfection wherever he was told
to expect it; if he had not discerned it, he had blamed his own dulness
of perception. It had been a heavy and soulless business; and the real
freshness of life, intellectual curiosity, mental independence, seemed
to have come to him in fullest measure, just at the age when most men
seemed to have parted with those qualities. As an undergraduate, he
had been more aware of fitfulness and weariness than anything; only
gradually had he become conscious of concentration, sustained zest,
intention. Then he had tended to condemn enthusiasm as a species of
defective manners. Now he lived by its steady light. Then he had been
at the mercy of a new idea, an attractive personality. He shuddered to
think how easily he had made friendships, and how contemptuously he had
broken them the moment he was disappointed. Now he weighed and tested
more; but at the same time he also opened his heart and his thoughts
far more deliberately and frankly to sympathetic and generous people.
Hugh seemed to have found rather than to have lost his youth. His
actual youth, indeed, seemed to him to have been a tremulous and
listless thing, full of fears and sensibilities, feminine, unbalanced,
frivolous. Life had so far been to Hugh pure gain. Looking back he
saw himself irresolute, vague, sentimental, incapable of application,
unmethodical, half-hearted. He had had none of the buoyancy, the
splendid dreams, the sparkling ambitions that seemed, according to the
records, to have been the stuff of great men's youth.
He sate one day in the ante-chapel of his old college, through a
morning service, listening, as in a dream, to the sweet singing within;
it seemed but a day since he had sate in his stall, a fitful-hearted
boy. The service ended, and the procession streamed out, the rich
tints of the windows lighting up the faces and the white surplices of
the men, old and young, that issued from the dark door of the screen.
Hugh felt within himself that he would not have the old days back again
even if he could; he was nothing but grateful for the balance, the
serenity, that life had brought him. He was conscious of greater
strength, undimmed energy, increased zest; faltering indeed he was
still, not better, not more unselfish; but he had a sense of truer
values, more proportion, more contentment. The mysteries of life were
as dark as ever, but at least he no longer thought that he had the key;
in those days his little rickety system of life, that trembled in every
breeze, had seemed for him to bridge all gaps, to explain all
mysteries. Now indeed chaos stretched all about him, full of huge
mists, dark chasms, hidden echoes; but he perceived something of its
vastness and immensity; he had broken down the poor frail fences of his
soul, and was in contact with reality. He did not doubt that he seemed
to the younger generation an elderly and sombre personage, stumbling
down the dark descent of life, with youth and brightness behind him;
but that descent appeared to himself to be rather an upward-rising
road, over dim mountains, the air glowing about him with some far-off
sunrise. Poetry, art, religion--they meant a thousandfold more to him
than they had meant in the old days. They had been pretty melodies,
deft tricks of hand, choice toys then. Now they were exultations,
agonies, surrenders, triumphs. The prospect of life had been to him in
those days like misty ranges, full of threatening precipices, and dumb
valleys in which no foot had trod. Now he saw from the hill-brow, a
broad and goodly land full of wood and pasture, clustered hamlets,
glittering, smoke-wrapt towns, rivers widening to the sea; the horizons
closed by the blue hills of hope, from which life and love, and even
death itself, seemed to wave hands of welcome ere they dipped to the
unseen. He blessed God for that; and best of all he had now no desire,
as he had had in the old days, to be understood, to be felt, to claim a
place, to exercise an influence. He had put all that aside; his only
concern was now to step as swiftly, as strongly as possible, upon the
path that opened before him, caring little whether it led on to grassy
moorlands, or sheltered valleys full of wood, or even to the towered
walls of some strong city of God.
XI
Platonism--The Pure Gospel--The Pauline Gospel--The Harmony
Hugh, in his leisure, determined to try if he could set his mind at
rest upon one point, a question that had always exercised a certain
attraction over him. This was to make himself acquainted with some
technical philosophy, or at any rate to try and see what the
philosophers were doing. He had not, he was aware, a mind suited for
the pursuit of metaphysics; he had little logical faculty and little
power of deduction; he tended to view a question at bright and radiant
points; he could not systematise or arrange it. He did not expect to
be able to penetrate the mystery, or to advance step by step nearer to
the dim and ultimate causes of things; but he thought he would like to
look into the philosophers' workshop, as a man might visit a factory.
He expected to see a great many processes going on the nature of which
he did not hope to discern, and the object of which would be made still
more obscure by the desperately intelligent explanations of some
obliging workman, who would glibly use technical words to which he
would himself be able to attach no sort of meaning.
But after a few excursions into modern philosophy, in which he seemed,
as Tennyson said, to be wading as in a sea of glue, he went back to the
earliest philosophers and read Aristotle and Plato. He soon conceived
a great horror of Aristotle, of his subtle and ingenious analysis,
which often seemed to him to be an attempt to define the undefinable,
and never to touch the point of the matter at all; he thought that
Aristotle was often occupied in the scientific treatment of essentially
poetical ideas, and in the attempt to classify rather than to explain.
Yet there were moments, it seemed to him, when Aristotle, writing with
a kind of grim contempt for the vagueness of Plato, was carried off his
feet by the Platonic enthusiasm; and so Hugh turned to Plato, which he
had scrambled through as an undergraduate long years before. How
incomparably beautiful it was! It revealed to Hugh what he had before
only dimly suspected, that the poet, the moralist, the priest, the
philosopher, and even the man of science, were all in reality engaged
in the same task--penetrating the vast and bewildering riddle of the
world. In Plato he found the philosophical method suffused by a
burning poetical imagination; and he thought that Plato solved far more
metaphysical riddles by a species of swift intuition than ever could be
done by the closest analysis. He realised that Plato's theory was of a
great, central, motionless entity, which acted not by expulsive energy
but by a sort of magnetic attraction; and that all the dreams, the
hopes, the activities of human minds were not the ripples of some
central outward-speeding force, but the irresistible inner motion, as
to the loadstone or the vortex, which made itself felt through the
whole universe, material and immaterial alike. The intense desire to
know, to solve, to improve, to gain a tranquil balance of thought, was
nothing more, Hugh perceived, than this inward-drawing impulse, calling
rather than coercing men to aspire to its own supreme serenity; all our
ideas of what was pure and beautiful and true, then, were the same vast
centripetal force, moving silently inward; all our sorrows, our
mistakes, our sufferings, were but the checking of that overpowering
influence; and any rest was impossible till we had drawn nearer to the
central peace. This seemed to Hugh to be not a theory but an intensely
inspiring and practical thought. How light-hearted, how brave a
secret! Instead of desiring that all should be made plain at once, one
could rejoice in the thought that one was certainly speeding homewards;
and experience was no longer a blind conflict of forces, but a joyful
nearing of the central sum of things. At all events, what a
blitheness, what a zest it gave to the genius of Plato himself! With
what eager inquisitiveness, in a sort of childlike gaiety, he hurried
hither and thither, catching at every point some bright indication of
the delightful mystery. Plato seemed to differ from the serious and
preoccupied philosophers in this, that while they were lost in a grave
and anxious scrutiny of phenomena, he was rather penetrated by the
cheerfulness, the romance of the whole business. The intense personal
emotions, which to the analytical philosophers seemed mere distracting
elements, experiences to be forgotten, crushed, and left behind, were
to Plato supreme manifestations of the one desire. One desired in
others what one desired in God; the sense of admiration, the longing
for sympathy, the desire that no close embrace, no passionate glance
could satisfy, these were but deep yearnings after the perfect
sympathy, the perfect understanding of God. And thus when Plato
appeared most to be trifling with a subject, to be turning it over and
over as a man may turn about a crystal in his hands, watching the
lights blend and flash and separate on the polished facets, he was
really drawing nearer to the truth, absorbing its delicious radiance
and sweetness. Those sunny mornings, spent in strolling and talking,
in colonnade or garden, in that imperishable Athens, seemed to Hugh
like the talk of saints in some celestial city. Saints not of heavy
and pious rectitude, conventional in posture and dreary in mind, but
souls to whom love and laughter, pathos and sorrow, were alike sweet.
Instead of approaching life with a sense of its gravity, its
heinousness, its complexity, timid of joy and emotion and delight,
practising sadness and solemnity, Plato and his followers began at the
other end, and with an irrepressible optimism believed that joy was
conquering and not being conquered, that light was in the ascendant,
rippling outwards and onwards. And then the supreme figure of all,
whether imaginary or not mattered little, Socrates himself, with what a
joyful soberness and gravity did he move forward through experience,
never losing his balance, but serenely judging all, till the moment
came for him to enter behind the dark veil of death; and this he did
with the same imperturbable good-humour, neither lingering or hasting,
but with a tranquil confidence that life was beginning rather than
ending.
And then Hugh saw in a flash that the essence of the Gospel itself was
like that. When he read the sacred record in the light of Plato, it
seemed to him as if it must in some subtle way be pervaded by the same
bright intuitions as those which lit up the Greek mind. It seemed to
Hugh a strange and bewildering thing that the pure message of
simplicity and love, with its tender waiting upon God, its delight in
flowers and hills, its love of great ideas, its rich poetry, its
perfect art, had taken on the gloomy metaphysical tinge that St. Paul,
with all his genius, had contrived to communicate to it. Surely it was
intolerable to believe that all those subtle notions of sacrificial
satisfaction, of justification, of substitution, had ever crossed the
Saviour's mind at all. In a sense He fulfilled the law and the
prophets, for they had laid down, in grief and doubt, a harsh code of
morality, because they saw no other way of leavening the conscience of
the world. But the Saviour, at least in the simple records, had not
trafficked in such thoughts; he had but shown the significance of the
primary emotions, had taught humanity that it was free as air, dear to
the heart of God, heir of a goodly inheritance of love and care. St.
Paul was a man of burning ardour, but had he not made the mistake of
trying to lend too intellectual, too erudite, too complicated a colour
to it all? The essence of the Gospel seemed to be that man should not
be bound by the tradition of men; but St. Paul had been so intent upon
drawing in those to whom tradition was dear, that in trying to
harmonise the new with the old, he had made concessions and developed
doctrines that had detrimentally affected Christianity ever since, and
gone near to cast it in a different mould. Of course there was a
certain continuity in religion, a development. But St. Paul was so
deeply imbued with Rabbinical methods and Jewish tradition, that in his
splendid attempt to show that Christianity was the fulfilment of the
law, he had deeply infected the pure stream with Jewish ideas. The
essence of Christianity was meant to be a _tabula rasa_. Christ bade
men trust their deepest and widest intuitions, their sense of
dependence upon God, their consciousness of divine origin. In this
respect the teaching of Christ had more in common with the teaching of
Plato, than the doctrine of St. Paul with the doctrine of Christ.
Christ was concerned with the future, St. Paul with the past; Christ
was concerned with religious instinct, St. Paul with religious
development. The strength of the gospel of Christ was that it depended
rather on the poetical and emotional consciousness of religion, and
thus made its appeal to the majority of the human race. Plato, on the
other hand, was too intellectual, and a perception of his doctrine was
hardly possible except to a man of subtle and penetrating ability.
Hugh wondered if it would be possible to put the doctrine of Plato in
such a light that it would appeal to simple people; he thought that it
would be possible; and here he was struck by the fact that Plato, like
Christ, employed the device of the parable largely as a means of
interpreting religious ideas. The teaching of the Gospel and the
teaching of Plato were alike deeply idealistic. They both depended
upon the simple idea that men could conceive of themselves as better
than they actually were, and upon the fact that such a conception is
the strongest motive force in the world in the direction of
self-improvement. The mystery of conversion is nothing more than the
conscious apprehension of the fact that one's life is meant to be noble
and beautiful, and that one has the power to make it nobler and more
beautiful than it is.
It seemed to Hugh, reflecting on the development of Christianity, that
perhaps it was not too much to say that the Pauline influence had been
to a great extent a misfortune; it was true that in a sense he had
resisted the Jewish tyranny, and moreover that his writings were full
of splendid aphorisms, inspiring thoughts, generous ideals. But he had
formalised Christianity for all that; he had linked it closely to the
Judaic system; he was ultimately responsible for Puritanism; that is to
say, it was his influence more than any other that had given the Jewish
scriptures their weight in the Christian scheme. It seemed to Hugh to
be a terrible calamity that had reserved, so to speak, a place in the
chariot of Christ for the Jewish dispensation; it was the firm belief
in the vital inspiration of the Jewish scriptures that had produced
that harsh and grim type of Christianity so dear to the Puritan heart.
With the exception of certain of the Psalms, certain portions of Job
and of the prophets, there seemed to Hugh to be little in the Old
Testament that did not merely hamper and encumber the religion of
Christ. What endless and inextricable difficulties arose from trying
to harmonise the conception of the Father as preached by Christ, with
the conception of the vindictive, wrathful, national, local Deity of
the Old Testament. How little countenance did Christ ever give to that
idea! He did not even think of the Temple as a house of sacrifice, but
as a house of prayer! How seldom he alluded to the national history!
How human and temporary a character He gave to the law of Moses! How
constantly He appealed to personal rather than to national aspirations!
How he seemed to insist upon the fact that every man must make his
religion out of the simplest elements of moral consciousness! How
often he appealed to the poetry of symbols rather than to the
effectiveness of ceremony! How little claim he laid, at least in the
Synoptic Gospels, to any divinity, and then rather in virtue of his
perfect humanity! He called himself the Son of Man; in the only
recorded prayer He gave to His disciples, there was no hint that prayer
should be directed to Himself; it was all centred upon the Father.
Here again the Aristotelian method, the delight in analysis, the
natural human desire to make truth precise and complete, had intruded
itself. What was the Athanasian creed but an Aristotelian formula,
making a hard dogma out of a dim mystery? The outcome of it all for
Hugh was the resolution that for himself, at all events, his business
was to disregard the temptation to formularise his position. With
one's limited vision, one's finite inability to touch a thought at more
than one point at a time, one must give up all hope of attaining to a
perfected philosophical system. The end was dark, the solution
incomprehensible. He must rather live as far as possible in a high and
lofty emotion, beholding the truth by hints and glimpses, pursuing as
far as possible all uplifting intuitions, all free and generous
desires. It was useless to walk in a prescribed path, to frame one's
life on the model of another's ideal. He must be open-minded, ready to
revise his principles in the light of experience. He must hold fast to
what brought him joy and peace. How restful after all it was to know
that one had one's own problem, one's own conditions! All that was
necessary was to put oneself firmly and constantly in harmony with the
great purpose that had set one exactly where one was, and given one a
temperament, a character, good and evil desires, hopes, longings,
temptations, aspirations. One could not escape from them, thank God.
If one only desired God's will, one's sins and sufferings as well as
one's hopes and joys all worked together to a far-off end. One must go
straight forward, in courage and patience and love.
XII
Sacrifice--The Church--Certainty