the same enlightening and invigorating quality. He did not fumble
among dreary details, but saw swiftly into the essence of things, so
that he smiled as he sate. A book would, on such occasions, touch into
life a whole train of pretty thoughts, as a spark leaps along a
scattered line of gunpowder. A few remembered lines of poetry, a few
notes played by unseen hands on a musical instrument, from a window
that he passed in the street, would give a sense of completed
happiness; so that one said, "Yes, it is like that!" The palings of
gardens, the screen of shrubs through which the pleasaunce could be
dimly discerned within, the high trees holding up their branches to the
air, all half guarded, half revealed the same jocund secret. Here, by
a hedgerow, in a lane, Hugh would discern the beady eye of a fat thrush
which hopped in the tall grass, or plied some tiny business among the
stems, lifting his head at intervals to look briskly round. "I see
you!" said Hugh, as he used to say long ago to the birds in the Rectory
garden, and the bird seemed almost to nod his head in reply.
And then, too, the houses that he passed all breathed the same air of
romance. There, perhaps, behind the wall or at the open window, sat or
moved the one friend of whom he was ever in search; but on these days
it mattered little that he had not found him; he could wait, he could
be faithful, and Hugh could wait too, until the day when all things
should be made new. If he walked on days like these through some
college court, the thought of the happy, careless, cheerful lives,
lived there in strength and brightness, by generation after generation
of merry young men, filled Hugh's heart with content; he liked to think
that all the world over, in busy offices, in grave parlours, in
pleasant parsonages, there were serious, commonplace, well-occupied
men, who perhaps, in a tiny flash of memory, sent back a wistful
thought to the old walls and gables, the towns with their chiming
bells, and remembered tenderly the days of their blithe youth, the old
companions, the lively hours. The whole world seemed knit together by
sweet and gentle ties: labour and strife mattered little; it was but a
cloud upon the path, and would melt into the sunlit air at last.
Hugh used to feel half amused at the irrepressible sense of youth which
thrilled him still. As a boy, he had little suspected that the serious
elderly men, of settled habits and close-shaved chins, had any such
thoughts as these under their battered exteriors. He had thought that
such persons were necessarily stolid and comfortable persons, believing
in committees and correspondence, fond of food and drink, careful of
their balance at the bank, and rather disgusted at than tolerant of the
irrepressible levity and flightiness of youth. Yet now that he himself
was approaching middle age, he was conscious, not indeed of increased
levity or high spirits, but of undiminished vigour, wider sympathy,
larger joy. Life was not only not less interesting, but it seemed
rather to thrill and pulsate with fresh and delightful emotion. If he
could not taste it with the same insouciance, it was only because he
perceived its quality more poignantly. If life were less full of
laughter, it was only because there were sweeter and more joyful things
to enjoy. What was best of all about this later delight, was that it
left no bitter taste behind it; in youth, a day of abandonment to
elation, a day of breezy talk, hearty laughter, active pleasure, would
often leave a sense of flatness and dissatisfaction behind it; but the
later joy had no sort of weariness as its shadow; it left one
invigorated and hopeful.
The most marked difference of all was in one's relations with others.
In youth a new friendship had been a kind of excited capture; it had
been shadowed by jealousy; it had been a desire for possession. One
had not been content unless one had been sure that one's friend had the
same sort of unique regard that one experienced oneself. One had
resented his other friendships, and wished to supersede them. But now
Hugh had no such feeling. He had no desire to make a relationship,
because the relationship seemed already there. If one met a
sympathetic and congenial person, one made, as it were, a sort of
sunlit excursion in a new and pleasing country. One admired the
prospects, surveyed the contours. In old days, one had desired to
establish a kind of fortress in the centre, and claim the fruitful land
for one's own.
Of course, in Hugh's dealings with the youthful persons whom he
encountered in his Cambridge life, he became aware of the existence of
the subtle barrier which is erected between youth and middle age; he
was conscious often that the delightful egotism of youth has, as a
rule, very little deference for, or interest in, the opinions of older
persons. Youth is so profoundly absorbed in its own visions, that it
is very rarely curious about the duller reveries of older people. It
regards them as necessarily dreary, grey, wise, and prudent. The only
thing it values is sympathy for itself, just as a child is far more
interested in the few chords which it can strum on a piano than in the
richest performance of a maestro. But Hugh did not find this to be
disagreeable, because he was less and less concerned about the effect
he produced. He had found out that the joys of perception are at least
equal to the joys of expression. Youth cannot wait, it must utter its
half-formed wishes, put out its crude fruits; and it used to seem to
Hugh that one of the most pathetic and beautiful things in the world
was the intensity of feeling, the limitless dreams, that rose shadowily
in a boy's mind side by side with the inarticulateness, the failure to
command any medium of expression. One of the reasons why young and
clever men are so desperately anxious to be amusing and humorous, is
because they desire above all things to see the effect of their words,
and long to convulse an audience; while they lack, as a rule, the
practised delicacy, the finished economy in which humour, to be
effective, must be clothed.
But, after all, what brought Hugh the best comfort, was the discovery
that advancing years did not bring with them any lack of sensitiveness,
any dreariness, any sense of dulness. It was indeed rather the
reverse. The whole fabric of life was richer, more impassioned, more
desirable than he had ever supposed. In youth, emotion and feeling had
seemed to him like oases in a desert, oases which one had to quit, when
one crossed the threshold of life, to plod wearily among endless sands.
But now he had found that the desert had a life, an emotion, a beauty
of its own, and the oases of youthful fancy seemed to be tame and
limited by comparison. Hugh still thought with a shudder of old age,
which lay ahead of him; but even as he shuddered, he began to wonder
whether that too would not open up to him a whole range of experiences
and emotions, of which to-day he had no inkling at all. Would life
perhaps seem richer still? That was what he dared to hope. Meanwhile
he would neither linger nor make haste: he would not catch at the past
as containing a lost and faded sweetness; neither would he anticipate,
so far as he could help it, the closing of the windows of the soul.
XXV
A Narrow Path--A Letter--Asceticism--The Narrow Soul
One morning when he was sitting in his rooms at Cambridge, Hugh heard a
knock at the door; there presently entered a clergyman, whom at first
sight Hugh thought to be a stranger, but whom he almost immediately
recognised as an old school-fellow, called Ralph Maitland, whom he had
not seen for more than twenty years. Maitland had been an idle,
good-humoured boy, full of ideas, a great reader and a voluble talker.
Hugh had never known him particularly well; but he remembered to have
heard that Maitland had fallen under religious impulses at Oxford, had
become serious, had been ordained, and had eventually become a devoted
and hard-working clergyman in a northern manufacturing town. He had
been lately threatened with a break-down in health, and had been
ordered abroad; he had come to Cambridge to see some friends, and
hearing that Hugh was in residence there, had called upon him. Hugh
was very much interested to see him, and gradually began to discern the
smooth-faced boy he had known, under the worn and hard-featured mask of
the priest. They spent most of that day together, and went out for a
long walk. Hugh thought he perceived a touch of fanaticism about
Maitland, who found it difficult to talk except on matters connected
with his parish. But eventually he began to talk of the religious
life, and Hugh gradually perceived that Maitland held a very ardent and
almost fierce view of the priestly vocation; he drew a picture of the
joys of mortification and self-denial, which impressed Hugh, partly
because of its intensity, and partly also from an uneasy sense of
strain and self-consciousness which it gave him. Maitland's idea
seemed to be that all impulses, except the religious impulse in its
narrowest sense, needed to be sternly repressed; that the highest life
was a severe detachment from all earthly things; that the Christian
pilgrim marched along a very narrow way, bristling with pitfalls both
of opinion and practice; that the way was defined, hazily by Scripture
and precisely by the Church, along which the believer must advance;
"Few there be that find it!" said Maitland, with a kind of menacing
joy. He was full of the errors of other sects and communions. The
Roman doctrine was over-developed, not primitive enough; the Protestant
nonconformists were neglectful of ecclesiastical ordinances. The only
people, it seemed, who were in the right path were a small band of
rather rigid Anglicans, who appeared to Maitland to be the precise type
of humanity that Christ had desired to develop.
As he spoke, his eye became bright, his lip intolerant, and Hugh was
haunted by the text, "The zeal of Thine house hath ever eaten me."
Maitland seemed to be literally devoured by an idea, which, like the
fox in the old story of the Spartan boy, appeared to prey on his
vitals. Hugh became gradually nettled by the argument, but he was no
match for Maitland in scholastic disputation. Maitland felled his
arguments with an armoury of texts, which he used like cudgels. Hugh
at last said that what he thought was the weak point in Maitland's
argument was this--that in every sect and every church there were
certainly people who held with the same inflexible determination to the
belief that they were absolutely in the right, and had unique
possession of the exact faith delivered to the saints; and that each of
these persons would be able to justify themselves by a rigid
application of texts. Hugh said that it seemed to him to be
practically certain that no one of them was infallibly in the right,
and that the truth probably lay in certain wide religious ideas which
underlay all forms of Christian faith. Maitland rejected this with
scorn as a dangerous and nebulous kind of religion--"nerveless and
flabby, without bone or sinew." They then diverged on to a wider
ground, and Hugh tried to defend his theory that God called souls to
Himself by an infinite variety of appeal, and that the contest was not
between orthodoxy on the one hand and heterodoxy on the other, but
between pure and unselfish emotion on the one hand and hard and
self-centred materialism on the other. To this Maitland replied by
saying that such vagueness was one of the darkest temptations that
beset cultured and intellectual people, and that the duty of a
Christian was to follow precise and accurate religious truth, as
revealed in Scripture and interpreted by the Church, however much
reason and indolence revolted from the conclusions he was forced to
draw. They parted, however, in a very friendly way, and pledged
themselves to meet again and continue their discussion on Maitland's
return.
A few days afterwards Hugh was surprised to receive a letter from
Maitland from Paris which ran as follows:--
"_MY DEAR NEVILLE,--It was a great pleasure to see you and to revive
the memories of old days. I have thought a good deal over our
conversation, and have made up my mind that I ought to write to you.
But first let me ask your pardon, if in the heat of argument I allowed
my zeal to outrun my courtesy. I was over-tired and over-strained, and
in the mood when any opposition to one's own cherished ideals is deeply
and perhaps unreasonably distressing._
"_You seemed to me--I will freely grant this--to be a real and candid
seeker after truth; but the sheltered and easy life that you have led
disguises from you the urgency of the struggle. If you had wrestled as
I have for years with infidelity and wickedness, and had seen, as I
have a thousand times, how any laxity of doctrinal opinion is always
visited upon its victim by a corresponding laxity of moral action, you
would feel very differently._
"_I think you are treading a very dangerous path. To me it is clear
that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in His recorded utterances, in
a world of incredible wickedness and vague speculation, deliberately
narrowed the issues of life and death. He originated a society, to
which He promised the guidance of the Spirit, and woe to the man who
tries to find a religion outside of that Church._
"_You seem to me, if you will forgive the expression, to be more than
half a Pagan; to put Christianity on a level--though you allow it a
certain pre-eminence--with other refining influences. You spoke of art
and poetry as if they could bring men to God, and that in spite of the
fact that, as I reminded you, there is not a syllable in our Lord's
words that could be construed into the least sympathy with art or
poetry at all. You called yourself a Christian, and I have no doubt
that you sincerely believe yourself to be one; but to me you seemed to
be more like one of those, cultured Greeks who gave St. Paul an
interested hearing on the Acropolis. And yet you seemed to me so
genuinely anxious to do what was right, that I am going to ask you,
faithfully and sincerely, to reconsider your position. You are
drifting into a kind of vague and epicurean optimism. You spoke of the
message of God through nature; there is no direct message through that
channel, it is only symbolical of the inner divine processes._
"_I am not going to argue with you; but I implore you to give some time
to a careful study of the New Testament and the Fathers. I feel sure
that light will be sent you. Pray earnestly for it, if you have not,
as I more than half suspect, given up prayer in favour of a vague
aspiration. And be sure of this, that I shall not forget you in my own
prayers. I shall offer the Holy Sacrifice in your intention; I shall
make humble intercession for you, for you seem to me to be so near the
truth and yet so far away. Forgive my writing thus, but I feel called
upon to warn you of what is painfully clear to me.--Believe me, ever
sincerely yours,_
"_RALPH MAITLAND_"
This letter touched Hugh very much with a kind of melancholy pathos.
He contented himself with writing back that he did indeed, he believed,
desire to see the truth, and that he deeply appreciated Maitland's
sympathy and interest.
"_No impulse of the heart, on behalf of another, is ever thrown away, I
am sure of that. But you would be the first to confess, I know, that a
man must advance by whatever light he has; that no good can come of
accepting the conclusions of another, if the heart and mind do not
sincerely assent; and that if I differ from yourself as to the precise
degree of certainty attainable in religious matters, it is not because
I despise the Spirit, but because I think that I discern a wider
influence than you can admit._"
He received in reply a short note to say that Maitland felt that Hugh
was making the mistake of trusting more to reason than to divine
guidance, but adding that he would not cease to pray for him day by day.
Hugh reflected long and seriously over this strange episode; but he did
not experience the smallest temptation to desert a rational process of
inquiry. He read the Gospels again, and they seemed to confirm him in
his belief that a wide and simple view of life was there indicated. He
seemed to see that the spirit which Christ inculcated was a kind of
mystical uplifting of the heart to God, not a doctrinal apprehension of
His nature. It seemed indeed to him that Christ's treatment of life
was profoundly poetical, that it tended to point men to the aim of
discerning a beautiful quality in action and life. Those delicate and
moving stories that He told--how little they dealt with sacramental
processes or ecclesiastical systems! They rather expressed a vivid and
ardent interest in the simplest emotions of life. They taught one to
be humble, forgiving, sincere, honest, affectionate; there was, it was
true, an absence of intellectual and artistic appeal in them, though
there were parables, like the parable of the talents, which seemed to
point to the duty of exercising faithfully a diversity of gifts; but it
was not, Hugh thought, due to a want of sympathy with the things of the
mind, but seemed to arise from an intense and burning desire to prove
that the secret lay rather in one's relations to humanity, and even to
nature, than in one's intellectual processes and conceptions.
And then as to the point that Christ enforced upon men a fierce ideal
of mortification and self-denial, Hugh could see no trace of it.
Christ did not turn his back upon the world; He loved and enjoyed
beautiful sights and sounds, such as birds and flowers. He did indeed
clearly assert that one must not be at the mercy of material
conditions, and that it was the privilege of man to live among the
things of the soul. It was the path of simplicity, not the path of
asceticism, that was indicated. Christ seemed to Hugh to be entirely
preoccupied with one idea--that love was the strongest and most
beautiful thing in the world; and that if one recognised that love
alone could be victorious over evil and pain and death, one might be
certain that its source and origin lay deepest of all in the vast heart
of God, however sadly and strangely that seemed to be contradicted by
actual experience. And so Hugh felt that whatever befell him, he would
not be persuaded to desert the broad highway of love and beauty and
truth, for the narrow and muddy alley of ecclesiastical opinion. The
kingdom of God seemed to him to have suffered more disastrous violence
from the hands of bigoted ecclesiastics than it had ever suffered from
the onslaughts of the world. Ecclesiastics polluted the crystal stream
at its very source by confining the river of life to a small and
crooked channel. Hugh prayed with all his heart that he might escape
from any system that led him to judge others harshly, to condemn their
beliefs, to define their errors. That seemed to him to be the one
spirit against which the Saviour had uttered denunciations of an almost
appalling sternness. The Lord's Prayer and not the Athanasian Creed
seemed to him to sum up the essential spirit of Christ. He believed
himself to be following the will of God in yielding to every emotional
impulse that made life more sacred, more beautiful, more tender, more
hopeful. He believed himself, no less sincerely, to be slighting and
despising the tender love of God for all the sheep of His hand, when he
made religion into either a subtle and metaphysical thing on the one
hand, or a conventional and ceremonious business on the other. The
peace that the world cannot give--how desirable, how remote that
seemed! How large and free a quality it was! But the peace promised
him by his friend seemed to him the apathy of a soul crushed and
confined in the narrowest of dungeons, and denying the existence of the
free air and the sun because of the streaming walls and shapen stones
which hemmed it round.
XXVI
Activity--Work--Isolation
Hugh went once to spend a few days with an old friend who had held an
important living in a big country town. It was a somewhat bewildering
experience. His friend was what would be called a practical person,
and loved organisation--the word was often on his lips--with a
consuming passion. Hugh saw that he was a very happy man; he was a big
fellow, with a sanguine complexion and a resonant voice. He was always
in high spirits: he banged doors behind him, and when he hurried
upstairs, the whole house seemed to shake. Every moment of his day was
full to the brim of occupation. He could be heard shouting directions
in the garden and stables at an early hour; he received and wrote a
great many letters; he attended many committees and meetings. He
hurried about the country, he made speeches, he preached. Hugh heard
one of his sermons, which was delivered with abundant geniality. It
consisted of a somewhat obvious paraphrase of a Scripture scene--the
slaughter of the prophets of Baal by Elijah. The preacher described
the ugly carnage with much gusto. He then invited his hearers to stamp
out evil with similar vigour, and ended with drawing a highly
optimistic picture of the world, representing evil and sin as a kind of
skulking and lingering contagion, which God was doing His best to get
rid of, and which was indeed only kept alive by the foolish perversity
of a few abandoned persons, and would soon be extirpated altogether if
only enough committees would meet and take the thing up in a
businesslike way. It was in a sense a vigorous performance, and Hugh
thought that though there was little attempt to bind up the
broken-hearted, yet he could conceive its having an inspiriting effect
on people who felt themselves on the right side.
His friend found time one evening, as they sat smoking together, to
inquire into Hugh's occupations, and read him a friendly lecture on the
subject of making himself more useful. Hugh felt that it was useless
to argue the question; but when he came away, somewhat dizzied and
wearied by the tumultuous energy of his friend's life, he found himself
wondering exactly how much resulted from this buzzing and humming
organisation. There was not a marked difference between his friend's
parish and other parishes, except that there were certainly more
meetings. Hugh had indeed an uneasy sense that a man with less taste
for organisation, and more leisure for pastoral intercourse with his
flock, might have effected more. The vicar's chief concern indeed
seemed to be with the prosperous and healthy members of his parish; if
there was a case of destitution, of illness, of sorrow, it was
certainly inquired into; some hard-featured lady, with a strong sense
of rectitude and usefulness, would be commissioned to go and look into
the matter. She generally returned saying cheerfully that she had put
things straight, and that it turned out to be all their own fault.
But Hugh found his reflections taking a still more sceptical turn. The
vicar's theory was that we were all put into the world to be of use to
other people. But his idea of helping other people was not to help
them to what they desired, but to what he thought it was right that
they should desire. He had very little compassion, Hugh saw, for
failure and error. If a parishioner was in trouble, the vicar tended
to say he had no one to blame but himself for it. Hugh felt that he
did not wish to be in his friend's parish. If one was able-bodied and
sensible, one was put on a committee or two; if one was unfortunate or
obscure, one was invaded by a district visitor. If one was a
Dissenter, one would be treated with a kind of gloomy courtesy--for the
vicar was great on not alienating Dissenters, but bringing them in, as
he phrased it; and if a Dissenter became an Anglican, the vicar
rejoiced with what he believed to be the joy of the angels over a
repentant sinner, and made him a parish worker at once.
Then Hugh went further and deeper, and tried to ascertain what he
really felt on the subject of usefulness. Tracing back the
constitution of society to its origin, he saw that it was clear that
every one owed a certain duty of work to the community. A society
could not exist in idleness; and every one who was capable of work must
work to support himself; and then a certain amount of work must be done
by the able-bodied to support those who were either too old or too
young to support themselves. But the labouring class, the producers,
were forced by the constitution of things to work even more than that;
because there were a certain number of persons in the community,
capitalists and leisurely people, who lived in idleness on the labour
of the workers.
He put aside the great majority of simple workers, the labouring
classes, because there was no doubt about their position. If a man did
his work honestly, and supported himself and his family, living
virtuously, and endeavouring to bring up his children virtuously, that
was a fine simple life. Then came the professional classes, who were
necessary too, doctors, lawyers, priests, soldiers, sailors, merchants,
even writers and artists; all of them had a work to do in the world.