second time in his life. Not a definite illness, but a lingering
_malaise_, which seemed to bereave him of all spring and energy. He
was told that he must not work, must spend his time in the open air,
must be careful in matters of food and sleep. He lived indeed for some
months the life of an invalid. The restrictions fretted him
intolerably; but he found that every carelessness brought its swift
revenge. He had previously felt little or no sympathy with invalids;
he had disliked the signs of illness in others, the languor, the sunken
eye, the fretfulness of fever, and now he had to bear them himself. He
had always felt, half unconsciously, that illness was a fanciful thing,
and might be avoided by a kind of cheerful effort. But now he had to
go through the experience of feebleness and peevish inactivity. He
used sometimes, out of pure irritability, to resume his work; but he
had no grip or vigour; his conceptions were languid, his technical
resources were dulled; and then came strange and unmanning dizzinesses,
the horrible feeling, in the middle of a cheerful company, that one is
hardly accountable for one's actions, when the only escape seems to be
to hold on with all one's might to the slenderest thread of
conventional thought. The difficulty was to know how to fill the time.
There was no relish in company, and yet a hatred of solitude; he used
to moon about, sit in the garden, take irresolute walks; he read
novels, and found them unutterably dreary. Music was the only thing
that lifted him out of his causeless depression, and gave back a little
zest to life; but the fear that was almost intolerable was the
possibility that he would never emerge out of this wretchedness. Day
after day passed, and no change was apparent; till just when he was on
the verge of despair, when the darkest visions began to haunt his mind,
the cloud began to lift. He found that he could work a little, though
the smallest excess was still punished by days of feebleness. But,
holding to this thread of hope, Hugh climbed slowly out of the
darkness; and it was a day to him of deep and abiding gratitude when,
after a long Swiss holiday, in which his bodily activity had come back
to him with an intensity of pleasure, Hugh realised that he was again
in his ordinary health.
But he had at this time a bitter disappointment. Just before his
father's death he had finished preparing a little work for publication,
a set of essays on a variety of subjects, to which he had devoted much
care and thought. To his deep vexation it met with a very contemptuous
reception. Its errors were mercilessly criticised, and it was
proclaimed to be the work of a sickly, sentimental dilettante. Hugh
found it hard to believe in the verdict; but his conviction was
established by the opinion of one of his old friends who, as kindly as
possible, pointed out that the book was both thin and egotistical.
Hugh felt as if he could never write again, and as if the chief
occupation of his life would be gone; but with renewed health his
confidence returned, and in a few weeks he was able to look the
situation in the face. The reception of the book had brought home to
him the direction in which he was drifting. He saw that a certain
toughness and hardness of fibre had been wanting. He saw that he had
tried to fill a book up out of his own mind, in a leisurely and
trifling mood. He had not attempted to grasp his subjects, but had
allowed himself to put down loose and half-hearted impressions, instead
of trying to see into the essence of the things he was describing.
But, his illness over, he was astonished to find how little both money
anxieties and the shattering of literary hopes distressed him. For the
first, it was clear that his mother and sister could live with an
adequate degree of comfort and dignity. And as for his literary hopes,
he realised that the failure had been a real revelation of his own
weakness; but he realised too that other people would forget about the
book still faster than he himself, and that no previous failures would
damn a further work, if only it possessed the true qualities of art;
and indeed from this time he dated a real increase of artistic faculty,
a sense of constraining vocation, a joy in literary labour, which soon,
like a sunrise, brightened all his horizon; and it was pleasant too,
though Hugh did not overvalue it, to find his work beginning to bring
him a definite, though slight reputation, and a position among
imaginative critics.
Moreover his new home began to have a very potent charm for him. His
mother had settled in a small ancient house in the depths of the
country. They had very few neighbours. The little building itself was
full of charm, the charm of mellow beauty and old human ownership; it
was embosomed among trees, and had a small walled garden, rich in
flowers and shade. He had been there but a few weeks, when he realised
that the old feeling of a vague friendliness and intimate concern with
nature had come back. It was as though the spirits, which had peopled
the remembered flowers and trees of his first home, had flitted with
them, and had taken up their abode in this other garden. The flowers
seemed to smile at him with the same shy mystery, the trees to surround
the house like a troop of loyal sentinels. The absence of the constant
social interruptions that had been characteristic of the Rectory was an
added charm; his mother and sister, too, though heavily overshadowed by
grief, found the place peaceful and congenial; and the best joy of all
was the sweet and fragrant relation that sprung up among the three.
They were like the survivors of a wreck, whose former familiarity had
been converted suddenly into a deep and emotional loyalty, by the sad
experiences through which they had passed together. The relations had
before been affectionate, but in some ways superficial. Hugh to his
surprise found himself daily making discoveries about his mother and
sister, through the close relationship into which they were brought.
Unsuspected tastes and feelings revealed themselves, and he began to be
aware of a whole host of new interests that sprang up between them.
Sometimes, when a hedgerow is rooted up, one may notice how a whole
crop of unknown flowers, whose seeds had been buried deep in the soil,
suddenly emerge to conceal the bare scarred ditch. Hugh thought to
himself that the experiences through which they had passed had had this
effect of enlarging and extending sympathies which were there all the
time, and which had never had an opportunity of revealing themselves.
And thus, out of sorrow and wretchedness, there sprang to light a whole
range of new forces, a vision of new possibilities. It seemed to Hugh
that he was like a man who had passed by night through an unfamiliar
country, by unknown roads; that as the darkness had begun to glimmer to
dawn, the shapeless shadows of things about him had gradually taken
shape, and revealed themselves at last to be but the quiet trees with
their gentle tapestry of leaves, leaning over his way; and what had
been but a formless horror, became revealed as a company of friendly
living things that beckoned comfortably to his spirit, and grew into
purer colour as the dawn began to break from underground.
XIX
Women--The Feminine View--Society--Frank
Relations--Coldness--Sensitiveness
Hugh had always felt that he had very little comprehension of the
feminine temperament; he realised to the full how much more generous,
unselfish, high-minded, and sympathetic women were than men, their
perceptions of personalities more subtle, their intuitions more
delicate; in a difficult matter, a crisis involving the relations of
people, when it was hard to know how to act, and when, in dealing with
the situation, tact and judgment were required, he found it a good rule
to consult a woman about what had happened, and a man about what would
happen. Women had as a rule a finer instinct about characters and
motives, but their advice about how to act was generally too vehement
and rash; a woman could often divine the complexities of a situation
better, a man could advise one better how to proceed. But what he
could seldom follow was the intellectual processes of women; they
intermingled too much of emotion with their logic; they made birdlike,
darting movements from point to point, instead of following the track;
they tended to be partisans. They forgave nothing in those they
disliked; they condoned anything in those they loved. Hugh lived so
much himself in the intellectual region, and desired so constantly a
certain equable and direct quality in his relations with others, that
he seldom felt at ease in his relations with women, except with those
who could give him the sort of sisterly camaraderie that he desired.
Women seemed to him to have, as a rule, a curious desire for influence,
for personal power; they translated everything into personal values;
they desired to dominate situations, to have their own way in
superficial matters, to have secret understandings. They acted, he
thought, as a rule, from personal and emotional motives; and thus Hugh,
who above all things desired to live by instinct rather than by
impulse, found himself fretted and entangled in a fine network of
shadowy loyalties, exacting chivalries, subtle diplomacies, delicate
jealousies, unaccountable irritabilities, if he endeavoured to form a
friendship with a woman. A normal man took a friendship just as it
came, exacted neither attendance nor communication, welcomed
opportunities of intercourse, but did not scheme for them, was not hurt
by apparent neglect, demanded no effusiveness, and disliked sentiment.
Hugh, as he grew older, did not desire very close relationships with
people; he valued frankness above intimacy, and candour above sympathy.
He found as a rule that women gave too much sympathy, and the result
was that he felt himself encouraged to be egotistical. He used to
think that when he spoke frankly to women, they tended to express
admiration for the way he had acted or thought; and if he met that by
saying that he neither deserved or wanted praise, he received further
admiration for disinterestedness, when all that he desired was to take
the matter out of the region of credit altogether. He believed indeed
that women valued the pleasure of making an impression, of exercising
influence, too highly, and that in this point their perception seemed
to fail; they did not understand that a man acts very often from
impersonal motives, and is interested in the doing of the thing itself,
whatever it may happen to be, rather than in the effect that his action
may have upon other people. It was part of the high-mindedness of
women that they could not understand that a man should be so absorbed
in the practical execution of a matter. They looked upon men's
ambitions, their desire to do or make something--a book, a picture, a
poem--as a sort of game in which they could not believe that any one
could be seriously interested. Hugh indeed seemed to divine the
curious fact that, generally speaking, men and women looked upon the
preoccupations and employments of the opposite sex as rather childish;
a man would be immersed in practical activities, in business, in
organisation, in education, in communicating definite knowledge, in
writing books, in attending meetings--this he thought to be the serious
and real business of the world; and he was inclined to look upon
relationships with other people, sentiment, tender affections, wistful
thoughts of others, as a sort of fireside amusement and recreation.
Women, on the other hand, found their real life in these things,
desired to please, to win and retain affection, to admire and to be
admired, to love and be loved; and they tended to look upon material
things--comfort, wealth, business, work, art--as essentially secondary
things, which had of course a certain value, but which were not to be
weighed in the scale with emotional things. There were naturally many
exceptions to this; there were hard, business-like, practical women;
there were emotional, tender-hearted, sensitive men; but the general
principle held good. And thus it was that men and women regarded the
supreme emotion of love from such different points of view, and failed
so often to comprehend the way in which the opposite sex regarded it;
to women it was but the natural climax, the raising and heightening of
their habitual mood into one great momentous passion; it was the flower
of life slowly matured into bloom; to men it was more a surprising and
tremendous experience, an amazing episode, cutting across life and
interrupting its habitual current, contradicting rather than confirming
their previous experience.
Hugh was himself rather on the feminine side: though he had a strong
practical turn, and could carry through a matter effectively enough,
yet he valued delicate and sincere emotions, disinterestedness,
simplicity, and loyalty, above practical activity and organisation; the
result of this, he supposed, was that he tended, from a sense of the
refreshment of contrast, to make his friends rather among men than
among women, and this was, he believed, the reason why he had never
fallen frankly in love, because he could to a great extent supply out
of his own nature the elements which as a rule men sought among women;
and because the complexity and sensitiveness of his own temperament
took refuge rather in tranquillity and straight-forward commonsense.
As he grew older, as he became absorbed more and more in literary work,
he tended, he thought, to draw more and more away from human
relationships; the energy, the interest, that had formerly gone into
making new relationships now began to run in a narrower channel.
Whether it was prudent to yield to this impulse he did not stop to
inquire. It seemed to him that many of his friends wasted a great deal
of force and activity from semi-prudential motives. As his life became
more solitary, an old friend once took him to task on this point. He
said that it was all very well for a time, but that Hugh would find his
interest in his work flag, and that there would be nothing to fill the
gap. He advised him, at the cost of some inconvenience, to cultivate
relations with a wider circle, to go to social gatherings, to make
acquaintances. He knew, he said, that Hugh would possibly find it
rather tiresome, but it was of the nature of an investment which might
some day prove of value.
Hugh replied that he thought that this was living life too much on the
principle of the White Knight in _Through the Looking-Glass_. The
White Knight kept a mouse-trap slung to his saddle; when it was
objected that he would not be likely to find mice on the back of his
horse, he replied that perhaps it was not likely, but that if they were
there, he did not choose to have them running about. Hugh confessed
that he did find ordinary society tiresome; but to persist in
frequenting it, on the chance that some day it would turn out to be a
method of filling up vacant hours, seemed to him to be providing
against an unlikely contingency, and indeed an ugly and commercial
business. He did not think it probable that he would lose interest in
his work, and he thought it better to devote himself to it while it
interested him. If the time ever came when he needed a new set of
relationships, he thought he could trust himself to form them; and if
he did not desire to form them, well, to be bored was bad enough, but
it was better on the whole to be passively rather than to be actively
bored.
But Hugh's theory in reality went deeper than that. He had a strong
belief, which grew in intensity with age, that the only chance of
realising one's true life was to do something that interested one with
all one's might. He did not believe that what was done purely from a
sense of duty, unless it pleased and satisfied some part of one's
nature, was ever effective or even useful. It was not well done, and
it was neglected on any excuse. His pilgrimage through the world
presented itself to Hugh in the light of a journey through hilly
country. The ridge that rose in front of one concealed a definite type
of scenery; that scenery was there; there were indeed a hundred
possibilities about it, and the imagination might amuse itself by
forecasting what it was to be like. But it seemed to Hugh that one
wasted time in these forecasts; and that it was better to wait and see
what it actually was, and then to enjoy it as vigorously as one could.
To spend one's time in fantastic speculation as to what was coming, was
to waste vigour and thought, which were better employed in observing
and interpreting what was around one.
And so Hugh resolved that his relations with others should be of this
kind; that he would not seek restlessly for particular kinds of
friendships; but that he would accept the circle that he found, the
persons with whom relations were inevitable; and that he would make the
most of what he found. Choice and selection! How little one really
employed them! the world streamed past one, an unsuspected,
unlooked-for friend would suddenly emerge from the throng, and one
would find oneself journeying shoulder to shoulder for a space. Hugh
thought indeed sometimes that one made no friendships at all of
oneself; but that God sent the influences of which one had need, at the
very time at which one needed them, and then silently and tenderly
withdrew them again for a time, when they had done their work for the
soul. One received much, and perhaps, however unconsciously, however
lightly, one gave something of one's own as well.
But all Hugh's relations with others were overshadowed by the great
doubt, which was perhaps the heaviest burden he had to carry, as to
whether one's individuality endured. The thought that it might not
survive death, made him shrink back from establishing a closeness of
emotional dependence on another, the loss of which would be
intolerable. The natural flame of the heart seemed quenched and
baffled by that cold thought. It was the same instinct that made him,
as a boy, refuse the gift of a dog, when a pet collie, that had been
his own, had been killed by an accident. The pain of the loss had
seemed so acute, so irreparable, that he preferred to live uncomforted
rather than face such another parting; and there seemed, too, a kind of
treachery in replacing love. If, on the other hand, individuality did
endure, the best of all relationships seemed to Hugh a frank and
sincere companionship, such as may arise between two wayfarers whose
road lies together for a little, and who talk easily and familiarly as
they walk in the clear light of the dawn. Hugh felt that there was an
abundance of fellow-pilgrims, men and women alike, to consort with, to
admire, to love; this affability and accessibility made it always easy
for Hugh to enter into close relationship with others. He had little
desire to guard his heart; and the sacred intimacy, the sharing of
secret thoughts and hopes, which men as a rule give but to a few, Hugh
was perhaps too ready to give to all. What he lost in depth and
intensity he perhaps gained in breadth. But he also became aware that
he had a certain coldness of temperament. Many were dear to him, but
none essential. There was no jealousy about his relations with others.
He never demanded of a friend that he should give him a special or
peculiar regard. His frankness was indeed sometimes misunderstood, and
people occasionally supposed that they had evoked a nearness of
feeling, an impassioned quality, which was not really there. "You give
away your heart in handfuls," said a friend to him once in a paroxysm
of anger, fancying himself neglected; and Hugh felt that it was both
just and unjust. He had never, he thought, given his heart away at
all, except as a boy to his chosen friend. But he gave a smiling and
tender affection very easily to all who seemed to desire it. He knew
indeed from that first experience something of the sweet mystery of
faithful devotion; but now he could only idealise, he could not
idolise. The world was full of friendly, gracious, interesting people.
Circumstance spun one to and fro among the groups and companies; how
could one give a unique regard, when there were so many that claimed
allegiance and admiration? He saw others flit from passion to passion,
from friendship to friendship--Hugh's aim was rather to be the same, to
be loyal and true, to be able to take up a suspended friendship where
he had laid it down; the most shameful thing in the world seemed to him
the ebbing away of vitality out of a relationship; and therefore he
would not give pledges which he might be unable to redeem. If the
conscious soul survived mortal death, then perhaps these limitations of
time and space, which suspended friendships, would exist no longer, and
he could wait for that with a quiet hopefulness. But if it all passed
away, and was as though it had never been, if life was but a leaping
flame, a ripple on the stream, then how could one have the heart to tie
indissoluble links?
Hugh half understood that the weakness of his case was that he could
argue about it at all. Others went blindly and ardently into loves and
friendships, because an irresistible impulse carried them away--with
Hugh the impulse was not irresistible. Meanwhile he would give what he
could, offer rather than claim; he would reject no proffer of
friendship, but he would not, or perhaps he could not, fetter himself
with the heavy chains of emotion. But even so he was aware that this
temperance, this balance of nature, was not a wholly beautiful or
desirable thing.
The perception of this came home to Hugh with peculiar force on a
bright fresh day of early spring, when he walked with a friend in the
broad green fields beside the Cam. They had been strolling first in
the college gardens, where the snowdrops were pushing up, some of them
bearing on their heads the crust of earth that had sheltered them;
crocuses rose in the borders, like little bursts of flame. A thrush
was singing on a high bough, and seemed to be telling, in an eager
mystery, the very hopes and dreams of Hugh's heart. He said something
that implied as much to his friend, who replied that he did not
understand that.
This friend of Hugh's was much younger than himself, a fastidious and
somewhat secluded nature, but possessing for Hugh the deep attraction
of a peculiar type of character. He had great critical and literary
gifts, and seemed to Hugh to bring to the judgment of artistic work an
extraordinarily clear and fine criterion of values. But beside this,
he seemed to Hugh to have the power of entering into a very close and
emotional relationship with people; and out in the meadows where the
sun shone bright, the breeze blew soft, and the first daisies showed
their heads among the grass, Hugh asked him to explain what he felt
about his relationship with others. His friend said that it came to
this, that it was the only real and vital thing in the world; and when
Hugh pressed him further, and asked him what he felt about the artistic
life, his friend said that it was a great mystery, because art also
seemed to him a strong, entrancing, fascinating thing; but that it ran
counter to and cut across his relations with others, and seemed almost
like a violent and distracting temptation, that tore him away from the
more vital impulse. He added that the problem as to whether
individuality endured (of which they had spoken earlier) seemed to him
not to affect the question at all, any more than it affected one's
sleep or appetite. At this, for a moment, a mist seemed to roll away
from Hugh's eyes, though he knew that it would close in again, and for
an instant he understood; to himself relations with others were but one
class of beautiful experiences, like art, and music, and nature, and
hints of the unseen; not differing in quality, but only in kind, from
other experiences. Hugh saw too, in the same flash of insight, that
what kept him from emotional relationships was a certain timidity--a
dislike of anything painful or disturbing; and that the mistake he
made, if that can be called a mistake which was so purely instinctive,
was his desire to obliterate and annihilate all the unpleasing,
painful, and disagreeable elements from all circumstances and
situations. The reason why Hugh did not hunger and thirst after
friendship was, he saw, that inconveniences, humours,
misunderstandings, mannerisms, _entourage_, were all so many
disagreeable incidents which interfered with his tranquillity of
enjoyment. If he had really loved, these things would have weighed as
nothing in comparison with the need of satisfying the desire of
relationship; as it was, they weighed so much with Hugh that they
overpowered the other instinct. It was really a sort of luxuriousness
of temperament that intervened; and Hugh felt that for a man to say
that he loved his friends, and yet to allow this fastidious sense of
discomfort to prevent his seeing them, was as if a man said that he was
devoted to music, and yet allowed the tumult of concert-rooms to
prevent his ever going to hear music. And yet the language of
friendship was so familiar, and the power of multiplying relations with
others was so facile a thing with Hugh, that he saw that his failure in
the matter was a deplorable and a miserable thing. He was singularly
and even richly equipped for the pursuit of friendship; while his very
sensitiveness, his inherent epicureanism, which made advance so easy,
made progress impossible.
And yet he realised that it was useless to deplore this; that no amount
of desire for the larger and deeper experience would make him capable
of sustaining its pains and penalties. He saw that he was condemned to
pass through life, a smiling and courteous spectator of beauty and
delight; but that, through a real and vital deficiency of soul, he
could have no share in the inner and holier mysteries.
XX
Limitations--Sympathy--A Quiet Choice--The Mind of God--Intuition