himself, from that haunting personality which, like a shadow, dogged
and imitated his movements, but all with a sombre blackness, a species
of business-like sadness of gesture, doing heavily and mechanically
what he himself did with such blitheness and joy. Again and again that
self seemed to thwart, to hinder, to check him. There were days, it
seemed to him, when a conflict was waged, an unequal conflict, between
that outer and that inner self. Days when the inner spirit was
intense, alert, eager, and when the outer self was languid, dreary,
mockingly sedate and indolent. Again there were days, and these were
the saddest of all, when the inner spirit seemed to Hugh to be
tranquil, high-minded, and strong; when that outer self was malign,
turbulent, and headstrong, and when all the resolution and vigour he
possessed, appeared to be wasted, not in following the higher aims and
imaginings with a patient purpose, but in curbing and reining the rough
and coltish nature that seemed so sadly yoked with his own. He felt on
those days like a wearied and fretful charioteer, driving through a
scene of rich and moving beauty, on which he would fain feast his eyes
and heart, but compelled to an incessant watchfulness, a despairing
strain, in watching and guiding his refractory, his spiteful steeds.
The control he had never forfeited wholly. Perhaps his sensitiveness,
his solitariness, his fastidiousness, had tended to keep his sensuous
nature within bounds.
But he went through strange moods, when he could almost wish that he
had not been so cautious, so prudent; he felt that he had travelled
through life as a spectator merely; and the element of passionate
feeling, of confessed devotion, of uncalculating love, had passed him
by. He used, in these moods, to wish that he had some soul-stirring
experience to look back upon, some passionate affection, some
overpowering emotion, which might have constrained him to open and
unashamed utterance. How had he missed, he used to ask himself, the
experience of a deep and whole-hearted love? There was nothing easier
in the world than to establish a certain intimacy of relation. He had,
he was aware, a friendly air and a certain simple charm of manner,
which made it an easy thing for him to say what was in his mind. A
single interview was often enough for him to make a friendship. He had
an acute superficial sensibility, which made it very easy for him to
divine another's tastes and emotions; and his own emotional
experiences, his freedom of expression, gave him the power of
interpreting and entering into the feelings of others. But his
experience was always the same. He could clasp hands with another
soul, he could step pleasantly and congenially through the ante-rooms
and corridors of friendship; but as soon as the great door that led to
the inner rooms of the house came in sight, a certain coldness, a
shamefacedness held him back; the hand was dropped, the expected word
unspoken.
Thus Hugh found himself with a great number of close friends, and
without a single intimate one. He had never bared his heart to
another, he had never seen another heart bare before his eyes. He had
never let himself go. Thus he was a master, so to speak, of the
emotional elements up to a certain point; but he had never made a
surrender of himself, and had always with a certain coldness checked
any signs of a surrender in others. A close friendship had once been
abruptly ended by the bestowal of certain deep confidences by his
friend, sad and touching confidences. This incident had drawn a veil
between him and his friend, a veil that he could not withdraw. His
evident coldness, on the day following, to the friend who had trusted
him, disconcerted and repelled the other. Hugh could remember a mute
and appealing look that he gave him; but though he felt that he was
acting ungenerously and even basely, he could only meet it with a blank
and repellent gaze, and the friendship had been broken off, never to be
renewed. He had made, too, friends with women both of his own age and
older; but the moment that the friendship seemed cemented, the emotion
on Hugh's part cooled into a _camaraderie_ which was both misunderstood
and blamed. Why go so far if you did not mean to go further? appeared
to be the unuttered question which met him; to which his own
temperament seemed always to reply, why shake our easy and comfortable
friendship by distracting and bewildering emotions? It was, Hugh grew
to discern, a real blot in his character; it was a prudence, a caution
in emotional things, a terror, no doubt, in a sensitive spirit, of
giving pledges, of making vows, of surrendering the will and the
spirit. It did not indeed bring him unhappiness--that was the saddest
part of it; but it left him involved in a kind of selfish isolation.
His soul, he felt, was like a smiling island, which with its green
glades and soft turf invites the wayfarer to set foot therein, with a
smiling welcome from the spirit of the place. But the wood once
penetrated, then at the back of the paradise ran a cliff-front of
sad-coloured crags, preventing further ingress. If indeed the shrine
of the island had stood guarded within a temple which, in its deep
columned and shadowed recesses, had shielded a holy presence, it would
have been different; but the land beyond was bare and desolate. That
was, Hugh thought, the solution. The bright foreshore, the waving
trees, the shelter and fountains, seemed to promise a place of delicate
delights; and there were some of those who landed there, who, on seeing
the pale cliff behind, believed, with a deep curiosity, that some very
sacred and beautiful thing must there be enshrined. But it was the
emptiness of the further land, Hugh thought, that made it imperative to
guard the mystery. In that bare land indeed he himself seemed to pace,
bitterly pondering; he would even kneel on the bare rocks, and hold out
his hands in intense entreaty to the God who had made him, and who
withdrew Himself so relentlessly within the blank sky, that a blessing
might tall upon the stony wilderness. But this blessing was withheld;
whether by his own fault, or through the just will of the Father, Hugh
could not wholly discern. The hard fact remained that the inner
fortress was blank and bare, and that no friend or lover could be
invited thither.
But as Hugh's manhood melted into his middle age, the conflict between
the outer and inner spirit decreased. He was still, as ever, conscious
of the coldness of his inner heart; but he grew to believe that a
compromise was possible, and that his work was to cheer and welcome,
with all the outer resources at his command, any pilgrims who sought
his aid. He became patiently and unwearyingly kind. There was no
trouble he would not take for any one who appealed to him. He gave a
simple affection, a quiet sympathy, with eager readiness; and learned
that, if he lacked that fiery and impetuous core of emotion, which can
make the whole world different to those who can light their torches at
its glow, yet he could smoothe the path and comfort the steps of less
ardent, less impulsive spirits. He could add something of light and
warmth to the cold world. If sometimes those who were attracted by his
genial bearing and sympathetic kindness were disappointed and troubled
at finding how slender a stream it was, well, that was inevitable. He
realised himself that his was a shallow nature, full of motion and
foam, wide but not deep, and that its bright force and swift curves hid
from others, though not from himself, its lack of force and energy.
And so when it came to him to lay aside his public work, and to enter a
life which seemed an almost disappointingly meagre field to those who
had formed high hopes of him, believing that he had a rich and prodigal
nature, a depth of insight and force, he made the change himself with a
fervent and abundant gratitude; feeling that he was unequal to the
larger claims, and would but have attempted to hide his lack of force
under a certain brisk liveliness and paradoxical display; while that in
the narrow channel which his life now entered, he would at least be
employing all the force of which he was capable.
He was not free from misgivings; but he felt that what appeared to be a
shrinking and cowardly diffidence to others, was the inevitable result
of the richness of his outer nature, the exuberance of which they held
to issue from a reservoir of secret force; but, though he sighed at
their disappointment, he felt that he was estimating himself more
truly; and that he lacked that inner fulness of spirit, that patient
unselfishness, which could alone have sustained him. He remained
indeed a child, with the charm, the gaiety, the simplicity of a child,
but with the wilfulness, the faint-heartedness, the desultoriness of a
child. And he felt that in making his choice he was indeed following
the will of his Father, making the most of his single talent, instead
of juggling with it to make it appear to be two or even ten.
He had his reward in an immediate and simple tranquillity of spirit.
He never doubted nor looked back. Those who saw him, and thought
regretfully what he might have been, what he might have done, would
sometimes give utterance to their disappointment, and even peevishly
blame him. But here again his coldness of temperament assisted him.
He submitted to such criticisms and censures with a regretful air, as
though he were half convinced of their truth. But the severer and
sterner spirit within was never touched or affected. Ambitious and
fond of display as he had been, the loss of dignity and influence
weighed nothing with him; he was even surprised to find how little it
touched him with any sense of regret or yearning. His fear had been
once that perhaps he was great, and that indolence and luxuriousness
alone held him back from exercising that greatness. But God had been
good to him in neither humiliating nor exposing him, and now that he
himself had lifted the lid of the ark in the innermost shrine, and had
seen how bare and unfurnished it was, he saw in a flash of humble
insight how wisely he was held back.
Truth, however painful, has always something bracing and sustaining
about it; and the days in which Hugh learnt the truth about himself had
nothing of gloom or sadness about them. The discovery indeed surprised
him with a certain lightness and freshness of spirit. He smiled to
think that he had entered the vale of humiliation, and had found it
full of greenness and musical with fountains. A great flood of peace
flowed in upon him; and all the delicate love of nature, of trees and
skies, of flowers and moving water, came back to him with an increased
and deep significance. Before, he had seen their outward appearance;
now he looked into their spirit; and so he passed along the dreary
valley light of foot and singing to himself. Mr. Fearing, in the
_Pilgrim's Progress_, went down from the House Beautiful into the
valley, said Mr. Greatheart, "as well as ever I saw man in my life. I
never saw him better in all his pilgrimage than when he was in that
valley. Here he would lie down, embrace the ground, and kiss the very
flowers that grew in the valley. He would now be up every morning by
break of day tracing and walking to and fro in this valley."
Even so was it with Hugh. The place that he had feared was revealed to
him in a moment as his native air. Men do not lose all of a sudden
their temptations, and least of all those who have desired the prize
rather than the labour. But Hugh saw that the place where he set his
feet was holy. And as for his poor desires, he put them in the hands
of his Father, and rejoiced to find that they were faithfully and
serenely purged away.
He began to learn, but with what infinite difficulty, what entanglement
of delay, that the great mistake that he had made in his religious
life, was the limiting the direct influence of God to the pietistic,
the devotional region. All the tender and remote associations of
childhood had to be broken off and drawn away one by one, as one snaps
and pulls ivy down from a wall, before he could reach the thought he
was approaching; and how often, too, did the old conception surprise
him, interrupt him, entangle him again unawares! It seemed to Hugh,
reflecting on the problem, how strange a thing was the pageant of life
all about him, the march of invisible winds, the sweeping up of cloudy
vapours, the slow ruin of rocky places, the spilling of sweet streams;
and then, in a nearer region, the quaint arbitrary forms of living
creatures, their innate instincts, their intelligence, so profoundly
and delicately organised in one direction, so weak in another; and then
again the horrible threads of cruelty, of suffering, of death, inwoven
so relentlessly in the fabric of the world, the pitiless preying of
beast upon beast; and, further still, the subtle and pathetic wisdom of
the human spirit, sadly marking what is amiss, and setting itself so
feebly, so pitifully, to amend it; the shaping of communities, the
social moralities, so distinct from, so adverse to the morality of
nature--reflecting, as I say, on these things, Hugh became aware, with
a growing astonishment, that though mankind attributed, in an easy and
perfunctory way, all these phenomena to the creative hand of God, yet
instead of trying to form a conception of Him and His dark thoughts
from this legible and gigantic handwriting, which revealed so
impenetrable, so imperturbable a will, they sought to trace His
influence only in some bewildered region of the human spirit, the
struggles of inherited conscience, the patient charity of men, that
would seek to knot up the loose ends which, in their pathetic belief in
self-developed principles, they could not help imagining that the Maker
of all had left unravelled and untied.
To believe in God and yet to seek to improve upon His ways! what a
strange and incredible contradiction! And yet what made the position a
more bewildering one still was the certainty that these very inner
impulses to amend, to improve, came from God as clearly as the very
evils that He permitted and indeed originated. What was the exit from
this intolerable tangle of thought? Law indeed seemed absolute, law on
a scale at once so colossal and so minute, law that sent the planets
whirling through space round the central sun--and yet dwelt, cell
within cell, in the heart of the smallest pebble that rolled upon the
sea-beach. And side by side with this law ran a thwarting force, an
impulse to make man do blindly the very things that led inevitably to
destruction, to endow him with an intense desire of life, and yet to
leave him ignorant of the laws that hurried him, reluctant and amazed,
to death. Hugh grew to feel that some compromise was necessary; that
to live in the natural impulses alone, or in the developed impulses
alone, was an impossibility. A hundred voices called him, a hundred
hands beckoned or waved him back; nature prompted one thing, reason
another, association another, piety another; and yet each was in a
sense the calling of God. The saddest thing was that to obey any of
the voices brought no peace or tranquillity; he obeyed piety, and
nature continued fiercely to prompt the opposite; he obeyed
association, and reason mocked his choice. He became aware that in
order to triumph over these manifold and uneasy contradictions, a
certain tranquillity of mind must be acquired; he found that to a large
extent he must trust intuition, which could at all events settle, if it
could not reconcile, conflicting claims; even when reason indicated a
choice of paths, the voice of the soul cried out clearly the way that
he must choose; the obedience to intuition was generally approved by
experience, until Hugh began to see, at last, that it was the safest
guide of all, and that thus we came nearest to the heart of God. He
found, indeed, very often, that even when prudence and reason afforded
excellent reasons for abstaining from action, to yield to intuition
turned out to be the wisest and the kindest course; until, in practical
matters, he learnt to trust it unhesitatingly, even if it led him, as
the light led the pilgrim, to stumble for a time in a field full of
dark mountains.
XXI
A Far-off Day--A Compact--Fragrant Memories
There was, as I have said, a strong visionary tendency in Hugh, which
had been to a certain extent restricted in the days of his professional
life; but now that he was free, it began to recur with extraordinary
frequency and force. It was when he was reading that this faculty
visited him, as a rule, and more especially when he read, as he was
accustomed to do, after he was awake in the morning, until the time
came for him to rise. The mind, struggling to free itself from the
dominion of sleep, had not yet put on the obedience of the day, but
seemed to act with a whimsical independence of its own. His thoughts
were then most apt to wear a melancholy tinge; a certain apprehensive
shadow often lay upon him, a sense of being unequal to the claims of
the day, a tendency to rehearse, without hopefulness or spring, the
part he would have to play, to exaggerate difficulties and obstacles.
Reading, as a rule, served to distract his thoughts; but it was hardly
an intellectual so much as a meditative process; the thoughts and words
of the writer, on such occasions, often seemed to him like beaters
going through a covert, trampling the fern and rapping the tree trunks,
starting from their lairs all kinds of hidden game.
One morning he was lying thus, reading quietly, when there suddenly
darted into his mind, for no particular reason, the thought of a summer
day he had spent as a small boy at his public school. It had been a
holiday; the day cloudless and bright, yet with a delicious coolness in
the air; and the sunshine fell, he remembered, on the great trees of
the place and the venerable buildings, gleaming through a golden haze,
which made it seem as though he viewed everything, not through empty
air, but through a tinted and tangible medium, as it were an aerial
honey, which lent a liquid sweetness to all outlines and surfaces. He
had wandered off with a friend, in that perfect afternoon, through the
meadows, for a long vague ramble, ending up with a bathe in the river.
The day was beautifully still, and he could almost smell the hot honied
fragrance of the flowers, and hear the angry murmur of the busy flies,
that sate basking on the leaves of the hedgerow. He seemed to himself
to have been full of a vague and restless emotion, a sense of happiness
that just missed its end, that would have been complete if there had
not been something wanting, some satisfaction of an instinct that he
could not put into words. His companion had been a boy of his own age,
who, it had seemed to Hugh, was in the same wistful mood. But there
had been no attempt to express in words any of these thoughts. They
had walked for the most part in silence, interrupted by the vague,
inconsequent, and rather gruff remarks, that are the symbols of equal
friendship. They had rambled a long way beside the stream, with the
thick water-plants growing deep at the edge. The river came brimming
down, clear and cool, the tiny weeds swaying among the dark pools, the
rushes bowing and bending, as though plucked by unseen hands. The
stream was full of boys in boats, and the eager noise and stir was not
congenial to Hugh's meditative mood. The bathing-place was by a weir,
where the green water plunged through the sluices, filling the stream
with foam and sound; all about floated the exquisite reedy smell of
warm river-water, bringing with it a sense of cool and unvisited
places, hidden backwaters among green fields, where the willows leaned
together, and the fish hung mute in the pools. They had bathed under a
tall grove of poplars, and Hugh could remember the delicious freshness
of the turf under his naked feet, and the sun-warmed heat of the wooden
beams of the wharf. The plunge in the cold bubbling water had swept
all his thoughts away into the mere joy of life, but as he sat, after
dressing, with the music of the water in his ears, the same wistful
mood had settled down on his mind.
What did it all mean? Whither was all this beauty, this delight
tending? He thought of all the generations of boys who had bathed in
this place, full of joy and life. Where were they all now? He thought
of those who should come after, when he too was gone to take his place
in the world. And then they had gone slowly back through the meadows,
with a delicious languor of sensation; the sun was now beginning to
decline, and the blue wooded hills across the stream, with the smoke
going up beneath them from unseen houses, wore the same air of holding
some simple and sweet secret which they would not tell, and which Hugh
could not penetrate. It was sad, too, to think that the beautiful day
was done, become a memory only; and that he must plunge again for the
morrow and for many morrows into the tide of affairs and boisterous
life. He made one effort to put his thoughts into words. Putting his
arm for a moment in the arm of his companion, he said, "Let us remember
to-day!" His friend, who was walking sedately along with a stalk of
grass between his lips, looked at him in a peculiar manner, smiled and
nodded; this little compact, so quietly made, seemed for an instant to
have brought Hugh and his friend together into a charmed circle. Had
his friend forgotten what he remembered? The last time he had seen
him, he had found a prosperous business man, full of affairs; and he
had not reminded him of the day when they went together by the stream.
The whole picture came before Hugh as an almost impossible sweet and
rapturous memory, clutching with a poignant passion at his heart. What
was the secret of the fragrant days that had departed and could never
return? Was it well to recall them? And what too was the secret of
that strange and beautiful alchemy of the mind, that forgot all the
troubles and cares of the old life, and even touched the few harsh
incidents that it did retain with a wistful beauty, as though they had
had some desirable element in them? Would it not be better, more
tranquillising for the spirit, if the memory retained only the dark
shadows of the past? so that the mind could turn with zest and interest
to the joys of the moment? Instead of that, memory tempted the soul,
by a kind of magical seduction, to dwell only upon what was sweet and
beautiful in the past, thereby emphasising and heightening the sense of
dissatisfaction with the present. Was it true that the very days that
were then passing, those sober, uneventful days, would at some future
time be touched by the same reluctant, pathetic quality of
recollection? It was certainly so; the mind, dwelling on the past, had
that extraordinary power of rejecting all the dreary debris of life,
and leaving only the pure gold, a hundred times refined; and yet it
brought with it that mournful shadow of sadness, of the irrevocable,
the irreplaceable past. But it seemed, too, to hold a hope within it,
a hope that, if the pilgrimage of the soul were not to be ended by
death, then memory, unshadowed by present sadness, in the deep content
of a freedom from all material anxieties, might become one of the
purest and deepest treasures that it was possible to conceive. Hugh
thought that his disembodied spirit might, in the after time, perhaps
haunt those very river-banks, and with the mystery solved that had
oppressed and darkened his human pilgrimage, might surrender itself to
that beautiful and absolute tranquillity, that peace which the world
could not give, for which he daily and hourly yearned. Perhaps indeed
it was the presence of some such invisible, haunting _revenant_
whispering at his ear, longing even for some contact with healthy
humanity, that had given him the wistful sense of mystery and longing.
Who could say?