relations with others, his exits and entrances, his silence and his
speech, a freshness and a zest, not directed to surprising or
interesting others--that was the most vulgar expedient of all--but with
a deliberate design to transmute, as by the touch of the magical stone,
the common materials of life into pure gold. He would endeavour to
discern the poetical quality in everything and in everyone. In
inanimate things this was easy enough, for they were already full of
pungent distinctness, of subtle difference; it was all there, waiting
merely to be discerned. With people it was different, because there
were so many who stared solemnly and impenetrably, who repelled one
with remarks about the weather and the events of the day, as a man
repels a barge with a pole. With such people it would be necessary to
try a number of conversational flies over the surface of the sleeping
pool, in the hope that some impulse, some pleasant trait would dart
irresistibly to the surface, and be hauled struggling ashore. Hugh had
seen, more than once, strange, repressed, mournful things looking out
of the guarded eyes of dreary persons; and it would be his business to
entice these to the light. He determined, too, to cultivate the art of
being alone. There were many people in the world who found themselves
the poorest of all company, and Hugh resolved that he would find his
own society the most interesting of all; he would not be beaten by
life, as so many people appeared to him to be. Of course he knew that
there were threatening clouds in the sky, that in a moment might burst
and drench the air with driving rain. But Hugh hoped that his attitude
of curiosity and wonder could find food for high-hearted reflection
even there. The universe teemed with significance, and if God had
bestowed such a quality with rich abundance everywhere, there must be a
still larger store of it in His own eternal heart. The world was full
of surprises; trees drooped their leaves over screening walls, houses
had backs as well as fronts; music was heard from shuttered windows,
lights burned in upper rooms. There were a thousand pretty secrets in
the ways of people to each other. Then, too, there were ideas, as
thick as sparrows in an ivied wall. One had but to clap one's hands
and cry out, and there was a fluttering of innumerable wings; life was
as full of bubbles, forming, rising into amber foam, as a glass of
sparkling wine. That cup he would drink, and try its savour. There
would be times when he would flag, no doubt, but it should not be from
any failure of desire. He would try to be temperate, so as to keep the
inner eye unclouded; and he would try to be perfectly simple and
sincere, deciding questions on their own merits, and with no
conventional judgment. Such an attitude might be labelled by peevish
persons, with prejudices rather than preferences, a species of
intellectual Epicureanism. But Hugh desired not to limit his gaze by
the phenomena of life, but to keep his eyes fixed upon the further
horizon; the light might dawn when it was least expected; but the best
chance of catching the first faint lights of that other sunrise, was to
have learnt expectancy, to have trained observation, and to have kept
one's heart unfettered and undimmed.
He saw that the first essential of all was to group his life round a
centre of some kind, to have a chosen work, to which he should be vowed
as by a species of consecration; it was in choosing their life-work, he
thought, that so many people failed. He saw men of high ability, year
after year, who continued to put off the decision as to what their work
should be, until they suddenly found themselves confronted with the
necessity of earning their living, and then their choice had to be made
in a hurry; they pushed the nearest door open and went in; and then
habit began to forge chains about them; and soon, however uncongenial
their life might be, they were incapable of abandoning it. There were
some melancholy instances at Cambridge of men of high intellectual
power, who had drifted thus into the academical life without any
aptitude for it, without educational zeal, without interest in young
people. Such men went on tamely year after year, passing from one
college office to another, inadequately paid, with no belief in the
value of their work, averse to trying experiments, fond of comfort,
only anxious to have as little trouble as possible, expending their
ingenuity of mind in academical meetings, criticising the verbal
expression of reports with extreme subtlety, too fastidious to design
original work, too much occupied for patient research, and ending
either in a bitter sense of unrecognised merit, or in a frank and
unashamed indolence.
Hugh saw that in choosing the work of one's life, one must not be
guided by necessity, or even mere rectitude. Work embraced from a
sense of duty was like driving a chariot in sea-sand. One must have an
enthusiasm for one's task, and a delight in it; for only by enjoyment
of the results could one tolerate the mechanical labour inseparable
from all intellectual toil. It was true that he had himself drifted
into official duties, but here Hugh saw the guidance of a very tender
providence, which had provided him with a species of discipline that he
could never have spontaneously practised. His great need had been the
application of some hardening and hammering process, such as should
give him that sort of concentrated alertness which his education had
failed to bestow; and none the less tenderly provided, it seemed to
Hugh, was the irresistible impulse to arise and go, which had come upon
him when the process was completed. And now he was free, with an
immense appetite for speculation, for intellectual pleasure, for the
criticism of life, for observation. It was the quality, the fine
essence of things and thoughts that mattered. To some was given the
desire to organise and manage the world, to others the instinct for
perception, for analysis, for the development of ideas. It was not
that one kind of work was better than the other; both were needed, both
were noble; but Hugh had no doubt on which side of the battle he was
himself meant to fight. And so he determined that he would devote his
life to the work, and that he would not allow any excessive intrusion
of extraneous elements. The blessing of the academical life was that
it entailed a certain amount of social intercourse; it compelled one to
come into contact with a large variety of people. Without this Hugh
felt that his outlook would have become narrow and self-centred. He
knew of course that there would be times when it would seem to him that
his life was an ineffective one, when he would envy the men of affairs,
when he would wonder what, after all, his own performance amounted to.
But Hugh felt that the great lack of many lives was the failure to
perceive the interest of ideas; that many men and women went through
existence in a dull and mechanical way, raking together the straws and
dust of the street; and he thought that a man might do a great work if
he could put a philosophy of life into an accessible shape. The great
need was the need of simplification; the world was full of palpitating
interests, of beauty, of sweetness, of delight. But many people had no
criterion of values; they filled their lives with petty engagements,
and smilingly lamented that they had no time to think or read. For
such people the sun rose over dewy fields, in the freshness of the
countryside, in vain: in vain the sunset glared among the empurpled
cloud-banks; in vain the moon rose pale over the hushed garden-walks,
while the nightingale, hidden in the dark heart of the bush, broke into
passionate song. And even if it were argued that it was possible to be
sensible and virtuous without being responsive to the appeal of nature,
what did such people make of their social life? they made no
excursions into the hearts and minds of others; their religion was a
conventional thing; they went to concerts, where the violins thrilled
with sweet passion, and the horns complained with a lazy richness, that
they might chatter in gangways and nod to their friends. It was all so
elaborate, so hollow! and yet in the minds of these buzzing, voluble
persons one could generally discern a trickle of unconventional
feeling, which could have made glad the sun-scorched pleasaunce.
Hugh determined with all his might that he would try to preach this
simple gospel; that he would praise and uphold the doctrine of
sincerity, of appreciation, of joy. He made up his mind that he would
not be drawn into the whirlpool, that he would intermingle long spaces
of eager solitude with his life, that he would meditate, reflect,
enjoy; that he would try to discern the significance of all things seen
or felt, and practise a disposition to approach all phenomena, whether
pleasant or painful, in a critical mood; and at the same time he
resolved that his criticism should not be a mere solvent; that he would
strive to discern not the dulness, the ugliness, the dreariness of
life, but its ardours, its passions, its transporting emotions, its
beauties. That was a task for a lifetime. Whatever was doubtful, this
was certain, that one was set in a mysterious, attractive, complex
place; if one regarded it carelessly, it seemed a commonplace affair
enough, full of material activities, dull necessities, foolish
stirrings, low purposes; but if one looked a little closer, there were
strange, dim, beautiful figures moving in and out, evanescent and
shadowy, behind the nearer and more distracting elements. Here was
hope, with a far-off gaze, beauty with mournful yearning eyes, love
with finger on lip and dreamful gaze. It was here that the larger, the
holier life lay. What was necessary was to keep apart, with deliberate
purpose, from all fruitless vexations, dull anxieties, sordid designs.
To detach oneself, not from life, but from the scum and foam of life;
to realise that the secret lay in the middle of it all, and that it was
to be discerned not by fastidious abstention, not by a chilly
asceticism, but by welcoming all nobler impulses, all spiritual
influences; not by starving body or mind, but by selecting one's food
carefully and temperately. If a man, Hugh thought, could live life in
this spirit, reasonable, kindly, humble, sincere, he could encourage
others to the same simplicity of aim. To be selfish was to miss the
beauty of the whole; for the essence of the situation was to reveal to
others, by example and by precept, what they already so dimly knew.
To find out what one could do, where one could help, and to work with
all one's might; to live strongly and purely; not to be dissuaded by
comment or discouraged by lack of sympathy; to meet others simply and
frankly; to be more desirous to ascertain other points of view than to
propound one's own; not to be ashamed to speak unaffectedly of one's
own admirations and hopes; not to desire recognition; not to yield to
personal motives; not to assent to conventional principles blindly, nor
to dissent from them mechanically; never to be contemptuous or
intolerant; to foresee contingencies and not to be deterred by them; to
be open to all impressions; to be tender to all sincere scruples; not
to be censorious or hasty; not to anticipate opposition; to be neither
timid nor rash; to seek peace; to be gentle rather than conscientious;
to be appreciative rather than critical--on these lines Hugh wished to
live; he desired no deference, no personal domination; but neither did
he wish to reject responsibility if he were consulted and trusted.
Above all things he hoped to resist the temptation of taking soundings,
of calculating his successes. Fame and renown allured him, none but he
could say how much; but he knew in his heart that he contemned their
specious claims, and he hoped that they would some day cease to trouble
him. He knew that much depended upon health and vigour; but on the
other hand he believed that the most transforming power in the world
was the desire to be different; why he could not stride into his
kingdom and realise his ideal all at once, he could not divine; but
meanwhile he would desire the best, and look forward in confidence and
hope.
XV
The Pilgrim's Progress--The Pilgrimage--Development--The Eternal Will
Hugh was seized, one bright February morning of clear sun and keen
winds, with a sudden weariness of his work. This rebellious impulse
did not often visit him, because he loved his work very greatly, and
there were no hours so happy as those which were so engaged. But
to-day he thought to himself suddenly that, lost thus in his delightful
labour, he was forgetting to live. How strange it was that the hours
one loved most were the hours of work that sped past unconsciously,
when one stood apart, absorbed in dreams, from the current of things.
It seemed to him that he was like the Lady of Shalott, so intent upon
her web and the weaving of it, that she thought of the moving forms
upon the road beyond the river merely as things that could be depicted
in her coloured threads. He took up the _Pilgrim's Progress_ and sate
a long while reading it, and smiling as he read; he wondered why so
many critics spoke so slightingly of the second part, which seemed to
him in some ways almost more beautiful than the first. There was not
perhaps quite the same imaginativeness or zest; but there was more
instinctive art, because the writer was retracing the same path,
lodging at the same grave houses, encountering the same terrors, and
yet representing everything as mirrored in a different quality of mind;
the mind of a faithful woman, and of the boys and maidens who walked
with her upon pilgrimage. There was not quite the same romance,
perhaps, but there was more tenderness and sweetness. It came less
from the mind and more from the heart.
Hugh smiled to see how rapidly the dangers of the road must have
diminished, if Mr. Greatheart had often convoyed a party on their way.
That mighty man laid about him with such valour, sliced off the heads
and arms of giants with such cordial good-humour, that there could
hardly, Hugh thought, have been for the next company any adventures
left at all. Moreover so many of the stubborn and ill-favoured persons
had come by a bad end, were hung in chains by the road, or lying
pierced with sorrows, that later pilgrims would have to complain of a
lack of bracing incidents. Still, how delicate and gentle a journey it
was, and with what caressing fondness the writer helped these young and
faltering feet along the way. What pretty and absurd sights they saw!
How laden they were with presents! Christiana had Mr. Skill's boxes,
twelve in all, of medicine, with no doubt a vial or two of tears of
repentance to wash the pills down; she had bottles of wine, parched
corn, figs and raisins from the Lord of the place, to say nothing of
the golden anchor which the maidens gave her, which must have impeded
her movements.
He read with a smile, which was not wholly one of amusement, Mr.
Greatheart's admirable argument as to how the process of redemption was
executed. The Redeemer, it seemed, had no less than four kinds of
righteousness, three to keep, which he could not do without, and one
kind to give away. Every detail of the case was supported by a little
cluster of marginal texts, and no doubt it appeared as logical and
simple to the author as a problem or an equation. But what an
extraordinary form of religion it all was! There was not the least
misgiving in the mind of the author. The Bible was to him a perfectly
unquestioned manifesto of the mind of God, and solved everything and
anything. And yet the whole basis of the pilgrimage was insecure.
There was no free gift of grace at all. Some few fortunate people were
started on pilgrimage by being given an overpowering desire to set out,
while the pleasant party who met at Madam Wanton's house, Mr. Lightmind
and Mr. Love-the-flesh, with Mr. Lechery and Mrs. Filth, and passed the
afternoon with music and dancing, were troubled by no divine misgivings.
Then, too, the Lord of the way found no difficulty in easing the path
of the gentler sort of pilgrims. He kept the Valley of the Shadow
comparatively quiet for Christiana and her tender band. The ugly thing
that came to meet them, and the Lion that padded after them, were not
suffered to draw near. The hobgoblins were stayed from howling. It
never seemed to have occurred to Bunyan to question why the Lord of the
way had ever allowed this unhallowed crew to gather in the valley at
all. If he could restrain them, and if Mr. Greatheart could hew the
giants in pieces, why could not the whole nest of hornets have been
smoked out once and for all? Even the Slough of Despond could not be
mended with all the cartloads of promises and texts that were shot
there. And yet for all that, when one came to reflect upon it, this
Calvinistic scheme of election and reprobation did seem to correspond
in a terrible manner with the phenomena of the world. One saw people
around one, some of whom seemed to start with an instinct for all that
was pure and noble, and again others seemed to begin with no preference
for virtue at all, but to be dogged with inherited corruption from the
outset. The mistake which moralists made was to treat all alike, as if
all men had the moral instinct equally developed; and yet Hugh had met
not a few men who were restrained by absolutely no scruples, except
prudential ones, and the dread of incurring conventional penalties,
from yielding to every bodily impulse. If truth and purity and
unselfishness were the divine things, if happiness lay there, why were
there such multitudes of people created who had no implanted desire to
attain to these virtues?
It was in the grip of such thoughts that Hugh left the house and walked
alone through the streets of the town, as Christian might have walked
in the City of Destruction. What was one to fly from? and whither was
the pilgrimage to tend? The streets were full of busy comfortable
people, some, like Mr. Brisk, men of considerable breeding, some again,
like the two ill-favoured ones, marked for doom; here and there was a
young woman whose name might have been Dull. What was one's duty in
the matter? Was one indeed to repent, with groans and cries, for a
corruption of heart that had been bestowed upon one without any choice
of one's own? Was one bound to overwhelm one's companions with
abundance of pious suggestions, to rebuke vice, to rejoice in the
disasters that befell the ungodly? It seemed a hopeless business from
first to last; of course, if one had Bunyan's simple faith, if one
could believe that at a certain moment, on the Hill of Calvary, a thing
had been accomplished which had in an instant changed the whole scheme
of the world; that a wrathful Creator, possessed hitherto by a fierce
and vindictive anger with the frail creatures whom he moulded by
thousands from the clay, was in an instant converted into a tender and
compassionate father, his thirst for vengeance satisfied, it would be
plain enough; but Hugh felt in the depths of his heart that whatever
else might be true, that was not; or at least if it had any semblance
of truth in it, it simply consummated a mystery so appalling that one
must merely resign all hope and courage.
What could one make of a Gospel that could lend any colour to a theory
such as this? Was it the fault of the Gospel, or was the error rooted
in human nature, a melancholy misinterpretation of a high truth? It
seemed to Hugh that the mistake lay there; it seemed to arise from the
acceptance by the Puritans of the Bible as all one book, and by the
deliberate extrusion of the human element from it. Christ, in the
Gospel, seemed to teach, so far as Hugh could understand, not that He
had effected any change in the nature or disposition of God, but that
He had always been a Father of men, full of infinite compassion and
love; the miracle of Christ's life was the showing how a Divine spirit,
bound by all the sad limitations of mortality, could yet lead a life of
inner peace and joy, a life of perfect trust and simplicity. The
clouding of the pure Gospel came from the vehement breath of his
interpreters. His later interpreters were men in whose minds was
instinctively implanted the old harsh doctrine of man's perverse
corruption, and the dark severity of God's justice; and thus the
Puritans were misled, because they laid an equal stress upon the whole
of the Bible, and spoke of it as all of equal and Divine authority.
Instead of rejecting, as faulty human conceptions, what did not
harmonise with the purer Gospel light, they sought and found in the
Gospel a confirmation of the older human view. They treated the whole
collection of books as all equally true, all equally important, and
thus they were bent on seeing that the Gospel should fulfil rather than
supersede the law. This was in part the spirit of St. Paul; and thus
the Puritan Gospel was the Gospel of St. Paul rather than the Gospel of
the Saviour. To Hugh the Old Testament was a very wonderful thing,
wonderful because it showed the rise of a spirit of personal
righteousness in the world, a spirit that worshipped morality with the
same vehemence and enthusiasm as that with which the Greeks worshipped
beauty. And thus because they had loved righteousness and hated
iniquity, there had been given to their imperious nation the reward
that the humanity of their race should be chosen to enshrine the Divine
Spirit of the Saviour.
Hugh felt that the weakness of the ecclesiastical position was its
obstinate refusal to admit the possibilities of future development. A
century ago, a man who ventured to hint that the story of Noah's Ark
might not be historically and exactly true would have been pronounced a
dangerous heretic. Now no one was required to affirm his belief in it.
Nowadays the belief in the miraculous element even of the New Testament
was undeniably weakening. Yet the orthodox believer still pronounced a
Christian unsound who doubted it.
Here lay the insecurity of the orthodox champions. They stumbled on,
fully accepting, when they could not help themselves, the progressive
developments of thought, yet loudly condemning any one who was a little
further ahead upon the road, until they had caught him up.
Still, the old Puritan poet, for all his over-preciseness of
definition, all his elaborate scheme of imputed righteousness, all his
dreary metaphysic, had yet laid his hand upon the essential truth.
Life was indeed a pilgrimage; and as the new law, the law of science,
was investigated and explored, it seemed hardly less arbitrary, hardly
more loving than the old. It was a scheme of infinite delay; no ardent
hopes, no burning conceptions of justice and truth could hasten or
retard the working of the inflexible law, which blessed without
reference to goodness, and punished without reference to morality. No
one could escape by righteousness, no man could plead his innocence or
his ignorance. One was surrounded by inexplicable terrors, one's path
was set with gins and snares. Here the smoke and the flame burst
forth, or the hobgoblins roared in concert; here was a vale of peace,
or a house of grave and kindly entertainment; and sometimes from the
hill-tops of the land of Beulah, there seemed indeed to be a radiant
vision, dim-descried, of towers and pearly gates, a high citadel of
heavenly peace. But how little one learned even of one's own strength
and weakness! The one instinct, which might itself be a delusion, was
that one had a choice in the matter, a will, a power to act or to
refrain from acting; there was a deep-seated impulse to fare onward, to
hope, to struggle. It was useless to blame the mysterious conditions
of the journey, for they were certainly there. The only faith that was
possible was the belief that the truth was somehow larger, nobler, more
beautiful than one could conceive it to be; and there was a
restfulness, when one apprehended what seemed so dark at first, in the
knowledge that one's character and environment alike were not one's own
choice; the only way was to keep one's eye fixed upon the furthest
hope, and never to cease imploring the Power that made us what we were,
to give us not abundant, but sufficient, strength, and to guide us into
acting, so far as we had power to act, as He willed.