from a morning hill, and left Hugh once more confronted with the
ugliness and dreariness of the actual world; only from his vision
remained the hope, the resolution, to extract from life, as it passed,
the purest and most delicate elements; its sweetness, its serenity; so
that he might leave, as far as was possible, an inheritance of undimmed
beauty for the memory to traffic with, to rid it so far as he could
from all the envy, the dull detail, the tiresome complexities that
might poison retrospect, leaving nothing but the fine gold of thought.
XXII
Death--The Real and the Ideal--A Thunder Shower--Storm and Shadow
Hugh was wandering as his custom was, one hot and thunderous day, in
the country lanes; it was very still, and through the soft haze that
filled the air, the distant trees and fields lost their remoteness, and
stood stiffly and quaintly as though painted. There seemed a presage
of storm in the church-tower, which showed a ghostly white among the
elms. A fitful breeze stirred at intervals. Hugh drew near the
hamlet, and all of a sudden stepped into a stream of inconceivable
sweetness and fragrance; he saw in a moment what was its origin. The
strawberry-pickers were out in a broad field, and from the crushed
berries, however lightly bruised, there poured this flow of scent, at
once rich and pure, with all the native soul of the fruit exhaling upon
the air. It was to other familiar scents like ointment poured forth;
it seemed indeed to Hugh that anything so intensely impressive to the
sense ought to have power to tinge the colourless air, which was thus
so exquisitely laden and impregnated.
He was now close to the church. It was a little, low, ancient
structure, with a small, quaint, open belfry, beautifully proportioned,
and all built out of a soft and mellow grey stone. The grass grew long
in the churchyard, which was not so much neglected as wisely left
alone, and an abundance of pink mallow, growing very thickly, gave a
touch of bright colour to the grass. He stopped for a while
considering the grave of a child, who had died at the age of five
years, with an artless epitaph painted on a wooden cross. The grave
was piously tended, though it bore a date of some ten years back; there
were little rose-trees growing there, and a border of pansies, all the
work, Hugh fancied, of children, doing gentle honour to a dead sister;
whom they thought of, no doubt, as lying below in all her undimmed
childish beauty; the pale face, the waxen limbs, the flowing hair, as
they had looked their last upon her, waiting in a quiet sleep for the
dawn of that other morning. How much better to think of her so, than
of the dreadful reality which Hugh, in a sudden, almost terrified,
flash of fancy, knew to be lying, an almost insupportable blot upon all
that was fair and seemly, in the stained and mouldered coffin. Yet
there was a place for that difficult horror too in the scheme of
things, though the thought seemed almost to taint the sweet air of the
place.
This was only one of the parts of the great mystery over which he
brooded so often; the noisome things of the world, its weakness, its
decay; the shivering repugnance of the spirit, the almost impossibility
of joy or courage in the presence of such thoughts; that was the
strangest part of it, the rebellion of the inmost central spirit
against what was so natural, so common. Death was harsh enough, but
that it should be attended with such an extremity of disgrace and
degradation--that seemed an intolerable thing.
Yet to the charnel-worm, rioting in all the horror of decay, there
could be nothing but a blind joy in the conditions which Hugh hardly
even dared to imagine. To indulge such thoughts was morbid, perhaps.
But here they presented themselves at every turn, and Hugh felt that to
turn his back upon them was but to shirk the part of the problem that
he disliked. Not so could he attain to any knowledge of the secret of
things. The horror must not of course be unduly emphasised; the
morbidity lay there, in the danger of seeing things out of due
proportion; but the proportion was just as much sacrificed, indeed more
sacrificed, by ignoring the facts. Neither was he at all afraid of any
undue preponderance of the morbid element in his contemplations. He
took far too deep a delight in the beautiful and gracious sights and
sounds of earth for that; and the conclusion that he drew, as he turned
away, was that a suspension of judgment in the face of an insoluble
mystery was the only course; to leave the windows of the soul open to
every impression, to every fact, whether it was the voice and glance of
humanity, the sweetness of art and sound, the appeal of ancient
buildings, the waving of tall trees, the faces of bright flowers, the
songs of lively birds in the thicket--ay, and the intimations of death
and decay as well, all that was ugly and wretched in humanity, the
coarse song from the alehouse, the slatternly woman about her weary
work, the crying of a child that had been punished, the foul oozings of
the stockyard. These were all as real, as true impressions as the
others. To strike some balance, neither to forget the ideal in the
real, or to lose sight of the real in the ideal, that was his task.
And the consolation, though a stern one, lay in the fact that, dark and
bitter as the mystery was at one point, gracious and glowing as it was
at another, yet it was certainly _there_. Concrete and abstract, the
impressions of sense, the intuitions of the spirit, each and all had
their part. In this life, this swift interchange of darkness and
light, of sunshine and gloom, he might never approach the secret--nay,
he did not even hope that he would. But at least he could draw a few
steps nearer, and with a humble heart he would wait for the glory that
should be revealed, or for the silence and darkness that it might be
would close upon him. For whatever should be the end, Hugh had no
doubt that there was certainly behind life a mind and a will, to which
it was not only no mystery, but a truth simple, obvious and plain; for
him, his duty was to use both observation and imagination; not to let
the imagination outrun the observation, but to mark all that he could,
and infer what he could; while at the same time he felt equally sure
that he was not to be a mere observer, blindly registering impressions,
content to analyse difficulties. Better than that was to repose an
ardent faith in his intuitions; but each alike, without the aid of the
other, was perilous and insecure.
While he thus reflected, there seemed to flow into his mind a deep
melancholy, which, like a dark liquid dropped into clear water, began
to tinge and cloud the translucent tide. To live by a due proportion
of emotion and reason, that was the problem; but how were they to be
mingled? One seemed so isolated in the matter, so left without any
certainty of guidance. If one allowed emotion too great a latitude,
one became sentimental, unbalanced, personal; if one was swayed by
reason, one became dry, impersonal, cold. Was one indeed meant to
stumble along the track, making irreparable mistakes, seeing only in
retrospect, with a shocking clearness of vision, what one ought to have
done? Was one to regret alike impulse and prudence? And the old
faults of temperament, how they appeared and reappeared! However
clearly one saw one's mistakes, however much one admired nobleness, and
generosity, and courage, could one change the innermost character at
all? The ghastly fact was that one seemed framed to desire the
unattainable. What broken, faded, feeble things the majority of men's
lives were! The pageant of human life seemed nothing more than failure
on a gigantic scale.
Suddenly the lightning writhed and fell, the thunder broke out over
Hugh's head, as he walked in the quiet lane; a rattling, furious peal,
like leaden weights poured in a cascade upon a vast boarded floor--an
inconceivable sound, from its sharpness, its tangibility, its solidity,
to proceed from those soft regions of the air, in which a velvety
greyness dwelt suffused, with a lurid redness in the west. The rain
fell a moment afterwards in a soft sheet, leaping in the road, and
making a mist above the ground.
It was soon over, while Hugh sheltered in a big barn, with a pleasant
dark dusty roof, and high piles of fragrant straw all about him.
What a change when he stepped out! the thunder had leapt into the west,
the air was clean and sweet, and a ravishing scent came from the
satisfied fields.
With the drench of rain, something poisonous seemed to have been washed
out of Hugh's mind. All that afternoon, in the sullen heat, he had
brooded stupidly and miserably enough, picking up, as it were, dart
after dart from his little bundle of cares and miseries, and pricking
his heart with them.
Where was it all gone? In the clear fresh air he felt like a man
awaked from a nightmare, and restored to cheerful life again. What did
past failures, future anxieties, matter to him? He had his work, his
place, his liberty, and what further could he need?
His liberty! How good that was! He might go and come as he would,
unquestioned, unblamed. He thought with a pitying horror of what his
life had previously been--the tangle of small engagements, the silly
routine work, in which no one believed; they had all been bound on a
kind of make-believe pilgrimage, carrying burdens round and round, and
putting them down where they had taken them up.
He determined that, whatever happened, he would do no more work in
which he did not believe, that he would say what he felt, not what
traditional formulas required him to say. Work! he believed in that
with all his heart, so long as it had an end, an object. To wrestle
with the comprehension of some difficult matter, there were few
pleasures like that! but it must have been an advance, when it was
over; one must feel that one was stronger, more clear-minded, more
alert, more sincere; one must not feel that one was only more weary,
more dissatisfied. His path was clear before him at all events.
Plans and schemes began to rise in Hugh's brain he felt as if he was
delivered from the brooding sway of some evil and melancholy spirit.
How strange was the power that physical conditions had upon the very
stuff of the mind! Half-an-hour ago the grievances, the self-pity, the
dissatisfaction had appeared to him to be real and tangible troubles;
not indeed things which it was wise to brood over, but inevitable
pains, to be borne with such philosophy as was attainable. But now
they seemed as unreal, as untrue, as painful dreams, from which one
wakes with a sharp and great relief.
What remained with Hugh was the sense of one of the dangers of the
solitary life--the over-influence, the preponderance of sentiment. The
only serenity was to be found in claiming and expecting nothing, but in
welcoming what came as a gift, as an added joy, to which one had indeed
no right; but which fell like the sunshine and the rain; one must be
ready to help, to work, to use one's strength at whatever point it
could be best applied, and to look for no reward. This was what
poisoned life, the claim to be paid in the coin that pleased one best.
Payment indeed was made largely; and the blessed thing was that if one
was not paid fully for one's efforts, neither was one paid relentlessly
for one's mistakes.
And then, as to the deeper shadows of the world, the sorrows, the
bereavements, the sufferings, the dark possibilities, that lay like the
shadows of trees across a sunlit road--death itself, that grim horizon
that closed the view whichever way one looked--the mistake lay in
attempting to reckon with them beforehand, to anticipate them, to
discount them. They were all part of the plan, and one could not alter
them. Better to let them come, to husband strength and joy to meet
them, rather than to dissipate one's courage by dwelling upon them.
Indeed all Hugh's experience showed him that troubles, even the
deepest, wore a very different aspect when one was inside them.
The very storm itself was a parable. Those zigzag ribbons of purple
fire, the fierce shouting of the thunderclap that followed! In all the
wide forest-tracts over which the tempest hung, all that grim artillery
did but rend and split some one tough tree. Rather it turned again to
gladden the earth, and the tears of heaven, that fell so steeply, only
laid the dust of the hot road, and filled the pasture and the lane with
the fragrance of the cleansed earth and the comforted brake.
XXIII
The Club--Homewards--The Garden of God
As Hugh became more and more enamoured of his work, and of the sweet
peace of the countryside, he became more and more averse to visiting
London. But he was forced to do this at intervals. One hot summer day
he went thus reluctantly to town; the rattle of the train, the heated
crowd of passengers, the warm mephitic air that blew into the carriage
from the stifling, smoke-grimed tunnel--all these seemed to him
insupportably disgusting. But the sight, the sound, the very smell of
London itself, was like a dreadful obsession; he wondered how he could
ever have endured to live there. The streets lay in the steady sun,
filled with fatigued, hurrying persons. The air was full of a sombre
and oppressive murmur; the smell of the roadways, the hot vapour of
cookshops, the din and whizz of vehicles, the ceaseless motion of
faces: all this filled him with a deep pity for those who had to live
their lives under such conditions. Was it to this that our boasted
civilisation had brought us? and yet it seemed that the normal taste of
ordinary people turned by preference to this humming and buzzing life,
rather than to the quiet and lonely life in the green spaces of the
country; Hugh had little doubt that the vast majority of those he saw,
even the pale, patient workpeople who were peeping, as they toiled,
grimy and sweat-stained, from the open windows, would choose this life
rather than the other, and would have condemned the life of the country
as dull. Was it he, Hugh wondered, or they that were out of joint?
Ought he to accept the ordinary, sensible point of view, and try to
conform himself to it, crush down his love for trees and open fields
and smiling waters? The sociable, herding instinct was as true, as
God-sent an instinct as his own pleasure in free solitude; and the old
adage that God made the country but man the town was as patently absurd
as to say that God made the iceberg, but the ant made the ant-heap.
He went to his club, a place which he rarely entered; it was full of
brisk and cheerful men, lunching with relish; some of them had hurried
in from their work, and were enjoying the hour of leisure; some were
the old frequenters of the place, men whose work in the world was over,
as well as men who had never known what it was to work. But these men,
even some who seemed crippled with age and infirmity, seemed as intent
upon their pleasures, as avid of news, as eager for conversation, as
particular about their food, as if their existence was of a supreme and
weighty importance, Hugh watched an elderly man, whom he knew by name,
who was said to be the most unoccupied man in London, who was
administering food and drink to himself with a serious air of delicate
zest, as though he were presiding benevolently at some work of charity
and mercy. He had certainly flourished on his idleness like a green
bay tree! Hugh was inclined to believe in the necessity to happiness
of the observance of some primal laws, like the law of labour, but here
was a contradiction to all his theories. He sighed to think of the
mountains of carefully prepared food that this rosy, well-brushed
person must have consumed in the course of his life! He was a
notoriously selfish man, who never laid out a penny except on his own
needs and pleasures. Yet here was he, guarded like the apple of God's
eye, and all the good things that the earth held--ease, comfort,
independence, health, honour, and the power of enjoyment--were heaped
upon him with a liberal hand. No wonder he thought so well of the
world! Hugh had heard him say, with an air of virtuous complacency,
that he was generally pretty comfortable.
Hugh did not grudge his luxurious ease to the great statesman who sate
in the corner, with an evening paper propped up on a silver dish, and
some iced compound bubbling pleasantly in his glass, smiling benignly
at a caricature of himself. He, at all events, paid for his comforts
by unremitting labour. But what of the sleek and goodly drones of the
hive?
Hugh had some cheerful unmeaning talk to several of his old friends,
who regretted that they saw so little of him; he laughed with careful
enjoyment at some ancient stories, very familiar to him, told him with
rich zest by an acquaintance. But he could not help speculating what
was the point of it all. Some of the happiest and most contented men
there were high officials, engaged with a sense of solemn importance in
doing work that could have been quite as well done by very ordinary
people, and much of which, indeed, might as well have been left undone
altogether. There was a bishop there, an old family friend of Hugh's
father, with whom he entered into talk. The bishop had once been a man
of great force and ability, who had been a conspicuous university
teacher, and had written profound books. But now he was looking
forward with a sense of solemn satisfaction to spending the following
day in going down to his diocese in order to preside at a Church
_fete_, make a humorous speech, and meet a number of important county
people. There was no question of any religious element entering into
the function, and Hugh found himself dimly wondering whether such a
development of the energies of Christian elders was seriously
contemplated in the Gospel. But the bishop seemed to have no doubts on
the subject.
Well, anyhow, this was life; this was what men had to do, and what as a
rule they enjoyed doing. Hugh had no objection to that, so long as
people freely admitted that it was simply their chosen diversion, and
that they did it because they liked it. It was only the solemn parade
of duty that Hugh disliked.
One of the friends whom Hugh met said to him smilingly that he heard
that he had become quite a hermit--adding that he must confess that he
did not look like one. Hugh replied laughingly that it was only that
he was fortunate enough to discover that his work amused him more and
more; at which his friend smiled again, and told him to beware of
eccentricity.
Hugh began to wonder whether his simple and solitary life was indeed
tinged with that quality; but he answered that he was finding out to
his great delight that he was less afraid than he used to be of living
alone, to which his friend, a good-humoured and ineffective man, said
that he found that the stir and movement of town kept people from
rusting. Hugh wondered--but did not express his wonder--what was
supposed to be the use of keeping the blade bright to no purpose; and
he wished to ask his contented friend what his object was; but that
appeared to be priggish, so Hugh left the question unuttered.
It was however with a huge relief that, his business over, Hugh found
himself in the homeward train. But at the same time he took himself to
task for finding this suspension of routine, this interruption of his
literary work, so unpalatable. He realised that he was becoming
inconveniently speculative; and that his growing impulse to get behind
things, to weigh their value, to mistrust the conventional view of
life, had its weak side, After all, the conventional, the normal view
reflected the tastes of the majority of mankind. Their life was laid
out and regulated on those lines; and the regulating instinct was a
perfectly natural development of human temperament. Ought he not to
embrace it for himself? was he not, perhaps, by seeking so diligently
for fine flavours and intense impressions, missing the food of the
banquet, and sipping only at the sauces? If his own work had been of
any particular importance; if he was exercising a wide influence
through his books, in the direction of leading others to love the
simple sources of happiness, then his withdrawal from ordinary
activities and pleasures would be justifiable. Was it justified as it
was? Hugh could not answer the question. He only knew that as the
train glided on its way, as the streets became less dense, as the
country verdure began to occupy more and more of the horizon; as the
train at last began to speed through wide fields full of ripening
grain, and hamlets half hidden in high elms, he felt the blessed
consciousness of returning freedom, the sense of recovering the region
of peace and purity dear to his spirit; and the thought of the hot
stifling town, with all its veins and arteries full of that endless ebb
and flow of humanity, seemed to him like a nightmare from which he was
being gradually delivered, and which he was leaving far behind him.
It was not peace, indeed! there was the obstinate spirit, repining,
questioning, reviewing all things, striving to pierce the veil. But
the veil was not so thick as it had seemed in the city. There he was
distracted, bewildered, agitated. But in this quiet country the veil
seemed thin enough. The trees, the flowers, seemed somehow nearer to
God, who of very truth appeared to walk as of old in the garden, in the
cool of the day.
XXIV
The Romance of Life--The Renewal of Youth--Youth
There were some days when the whole air of the place, the houses, the
fields, the gardens, even the very people that Hugh met in the streets,
seemed to be full of romance and poetry. There was no particular
quality about the days themselves, that Hugh could ever divine, that
produced this impression. Perhaps such moods came oftener and more
poignantly when the air was cool and fresh, when the temperate sun
filled his low rooms from end to end, lay serene upon the pastures, or
danced in the ripples of the stream. But the mood came just as
inevitably on dull days, when the sky was roofed with high grey clouds,
or even on raw days of winter, when fitful gusts whirled round corners,
and when the spouts and cornices dripped with slow rains. In these
hours the whole world seemed possessed by some gracious and sweet
mystery; everything was in the secret, everything was included in the
eager and high-hearted conspiracy. It was all the same, on such days,
whether Hugh was alone or with company; if he was among friends or even
strangers, they seemed to look upon him, to speak, to move, with a
blithe significance; he seemed to intercept tender messages in a casual
glance, to experience the sense of a delighted goodwill, such as reigns
among a party of friends on an expedition of pleasure. This mood did
not produce in Hugh the sense of merriment or high spirits; it was not
an excited frame of mind; it was rather a feeling of widespread
tenderness, a sort of brotherly admiration. At such moments, the most
crabbed and peevish person seemed to be transfigured, to be acting a
delightful part for the pleasure of a spectator, and an inner
benevolence, a desire to contribute zest and amusement to the banquet
of life, seemed to underlie the most fractious gestures or irritable
speech. On such days, one seemed to have an affectionate understanding
with even slight acquaintances, an understanding which seemed to say,
"We are all comrades in heart, and nothing but circumstance and bodily
limitation prevents us from being comrades in life." Hugh used to
fancy that this mood was like an earnest of the bodiless joy, the free
companionship of heaven, if such a place there were, where one should
know even as one was known, and be able to enter in and possess, in a
flash of thought, the whole fabric of a fellow-creature's soul.