accordance with most of your views? Of course legislation is not the
end; it is only a way of dealing with refractory minorities. The
highest individual freedom is what I aim at. But the mistake you make
is in thinking that the individual effects anything; he is only the
link in the chain. It is all a much larger tide, which is moving
resistlessly in the background. It is this movement that I watch with
the deepest hope and concern. I do not profess to direct or regulate
it, it is much too large a thing for that; I merely desire to remove as
far as I can the obstacles that hinder the incoming flood."
"Well," said Hugh, smiling, "as long as you do not threaten my
individual freedom, I do not very much care."
"Ah," said Sheldon, "now you are talking like the worst kind of
aristocrat, the early-Victorian Whig, the man who has a strong belief
in popular liberty, combined with an equally strong sense of personal
superiority."
"No, indeed!" said Hugh, "I bow most sincerely before the rights of
society. I only claim that as long as I do not interfere with other
people, they will not interfere with me. I recognise to the full the
duty of men to work, but when I have complied with that, I want to
approach the world in my own way. I am aware that reason tells me I am
one of a vast class, and that I have certain limitations, but at the
same time instinct tells me that I am sternly and severely isolated.
No one and nothing can intrude into my mind and self; and I feel
inclined to answer you like Dionysus in the _Frogs of Aristophanes_,
who says to Hercules when he is being hectored, "Don't come pitching
your tent in my mind, you have a house of your own!"--_Secretum meum
mihi_, as St. Francis of Assisi said--identity is the one thing of
which I am absolutely sure. One must go on perceiving, drawing in
impressions, feeling, doubting, suffering; one knows that souls like
one's own are moving in the mist; and if one can discern any ray of
light, any break in the clouds, one must shout one's loudest to one's
comrades; but you seem to me to want to silence my lonely experiences
by the vote of the majority, and the vote of the majority seems to me
essentially a dull and tiresome thing. Of course this sounds to you
the direst egotism; but when one has labelled a thing egotistic, one
has not necessarily condemned it, because the essence of the world is
its egotism. You would no doubt say that we are no more alone than the
leaves of a tree, that the sap which is in one leaf at one moment is
the next moment in another, and that we are more linked than we know.
I would give much to have that sense, but it is denied me, and
meanwhile the pressure of that corporate force of which you speak seems
to me merely to menace my own liberty, which is to me both sacred and
dear."
Sheldon smiled. "Yes," he said, "we do indeed speak different
languages. To me this sense of isolation of which you speak is merely
a melancholy phantom. I rejoice to feel one of a great company, and I
exult when the sap of the great tree flows up into my own small veins;
but do not think that I disapprove of your position. I only feel that
you are doing unconsciously the very thing that I desire you to do.
But at the same time I think that you are missing a great source of
strength, seeing a thing from the outside instead of feeling it from
the inside. Yet I think that is the way in which artists help the
world, through the passionate realisation of themselves. But you must
not think that you are carrying away your share of the spoil to your
lonely tent. It belongs to all of us, even what you have yourself won."
Hugh felt that Sheldon was probably speaking the truth. He thought
long and earnestly over his words. But the practical outcome of his
reflections was that he realised the uselessness of trying to embrace
an idea which one did not instinctively feel. He knew that his real
life did not lie, at all events for the present, in movements and
organisations. They were meaningless words to him. His only
conception of relationships was the personal conception. He desired
with all his heart the uplifting, the amelioration of human beings; he
could contribute best, he thought, to that, by speaking out whatever he
perceived and felt, to such a circle as was in sympathy with him.
Sheldon, no doubt, was doing exactly the same thing; there were
abundance of people in the world, who would agree neither with Sheldon
nor himself, amiable materialists, whose only instinct was to compass
their own prosperity and comfort, and who cared neither for humanity
nor for beauty, except in so far as they ministered to their own
convenience. Hugh did not sympathise with such people, and indeed he
found it hard to conceive, if what philosophers and priests predicated
of the purpose of God was true, how such people came into being. The
mistake, the generous mistake, that Sheldon made, was to think that
humanity was righting itself. It was perhaps being righted, but ah,
how slowly! The error was to believe that one's theories were the
right ones. It was all far larger, vaster, more mysterious than that.
Hugh knew that the element in nature and the world to which he himself
responded most eagerly was the element of beauty. The existence of
beauty, the appeal it made to the human spirit, seemed to him the most
hopeful thing in the world. But he could not be sure that the
salvation of the world lay there. Meantime, while he felt the appeal,
it was his duty to tell it out among the heathen, just as it was
Sheldon's duty to preach the corporateness of humanity; but Hugh
believed that the truth lay with neither, but that both these instincts
were but as hues of a prism, that went to the making up of the pure
white light. They were rather disintegrations of some central truth,
component elements of it rather than the truth itself. They were not
in the least inconsistent with each other, though they differed
exceedingly; and so he determined to follow his own path as faithfully
as he could, and not, in response to strident cries of justice and
truth, and still less in deference to taunts of selfishness and
epithets of shame, to lend a timorous hand to a work in the value of
which he indeed sincerely believed, but which he did not believe to be
his own work. The tide was indeed rolling in, and the breakers
plunging on the beach; but so far as helping it on went, it seemed to
him to matter little whether you sat and watched it with awe and
amazement, with rapture and even with terror, or whether you ran to and
fro, as Sheldon seemed to him to be doing, busying himself in digging
little channels in the sand, that the roaring sea, with the wind at its
back, might foam a little higher thus upon the shore.
XXIX
Bees--A Patient Learner
The morning sun fell brightly on Hugh's breakfast-table; and a
honeycomb that stood there, its little cells stored with translucent
sweetness, fragrant with the pure breath of many flowers, sparkled with
a golden light. Hugh fell to wondering over it. One's food, as a
rule, transformed and dignified by art, and enclosed in vessels of
metal and porcelain, had little that was simple or ancient about its
associations; how the world indeed was ransacked for one's pleasure!
meats, herbs, spices, minerals--it was strange to think what a
complexity of materials was gathered for one's delight; but honey
seemed to take one back into an old and savage world. Samson had
gathered it from the lion's bones, Jonathan had thrust his staff into
the comb, and put the bright oozings to his lips; humanity in its most
ancient and barbarous form had taken delight in this patiently
manufactured confection. But a further thought came to him; the
philosopher spoke of a development in nature, a slow moving upward
through painfully gathered experience. It was an attractive thought,
no doubt, and gave a clue to the bewildering differences of the world.
But after all how incredibly slow a progress it was! The whole course
of history was minute enough, no doubt, in comparison with what had
been; but so far as the records of mankind existed, it was not possible
to trace that any great development had taken place. The lines of
species that one saw to-day were just as distinct as they had been when
the records of man began. They seemed to run, like separate threads
out of the tapestry, complete and entire from end to end, not mixing or
intermingling. Fish, birds, quadrupeds--some had died out indeed, but
no creature mentioned in the earliest records showed the smallest sign
of approximating or drawing near to any other creature; no bird had
lost its wings or gained its hands; no quadruped had deserted instinct
for reason. Bees were a case in point. They were insects of a
marvellous wisdom. They had a community, a government, almost laws.
They knew their own business, and followed it with intense enthusiasm.
Yet in all the centuries during which they had been robbed and
despoiled for the pleasure of man, they had learnt no prudence or
caution. They had not even learned to rebel. Generation after
generation, in fragrant cottage gardens, they made their delicious
store, laying it up for their offspring. Year after year that store
had been rifled; yet for all their curious wisdom, their subtle
calculations, no suspicion ever seemed to have entered their heads of
what was going forward. They did not even try to find a secret place
in the woods for their nest; they built obediently in the
straw-thatched hives, and the same spoliation continued. A few days
before Hugh had visited a church in the neighbourhood, and had become
aware of a loud humming in the chancel. He found that an immense swarm
of bees had been hatched out in the roof, and were dying in hundreds,
in their attempt to escape through the closed windows. There were
plenty of apertures in the church through which they could have
escaped, if they had had any idea of exploration. But they were
content to buzz feebly up and down the panes, till strength failed
them, and they dropped down on to the sill among the bodies of their
brothers. An old man who was digging in the churchyard told Hugh that
the same thing had gone on in the church every summer for as long as he
could remember.
And yet one did not hesitate to accept the Darwinian theory, on the
word of scientific men, though the whole of visible and recorded
experience seemed to contradict it. Even stranger than the amazing
complexity of the whole scheme, was the incredible patience with which
the matter was matured. What was more wonderful yet, man, by his power
of observing the tendencies of nature, could make her laws to a certain
extent serve his own ends. He could, for instance, by breeding
carefully from short-legged sheep, in itself a fortuitous and
unaccountable variation from the normal type, produce a species that
should be unable to leap fences which their long-legged ancestors could
surmount; he could thus save himself the trouble of erecting higher
fences. This power in man, this faculty for rapid self-improvement,
differentiated him from all the beasts of the field; how had that
faculty arisen? it seemed a gap that no amount of development could
bridge. If nature had all been perfect, if its rules had been
absolutely invariable, if existence were conditioned by regular laws,
it would be easy enough to believe in God. And yet as it was, it
seemed so imperfect, and in some ways so unsatisfactory; so fortuitous
in certain respects, so wanting in prevision, so amazingly deliberate.
Such an infinity of care seemed lavished on the delicate structure of
the smallest insects and plants, such a prodigal fancy; and yet the
laws that governed them seemed so strangely incomplete, like a patient,
artistic, whimsical force, working on in spite of insuperable
difficulties. It looked sometimes like a conflict of minds, instead of
one mind.
And then, too, the wonder which one felt seemed to lead nowhere. It
did not even lead one to ascertain sure principles of conduct and life.
The utmost prudence, the most careful attempt to follow the guidance of
those natural laws, was liable to be rendered fruitless by what was
called an accident. One's instinct to retain life, to grasp at
happiness, was so strong; and yet, again and again, one was taught that
it was all on sufferance, and that one must count on nothing. One was
set, it seemed, in a vast labyrinth; one must go forward, whether one
would or no, among trackless paths, overhung by innumerable perils.
The only thing that seemed sure to Hugh was that the more one allowed
the awe, the bewilderment, to penetrate one's heart and mind, the more
that one indulged a fearful curiosity as to the end and purpose of it
all, the nearer one came, if not to learning the lesson, yet at least
towards reaching a state of preparedness that might fit one to receive
the further confidence of God. Such tranquillity as one gained by
putting aside the problems which encompassed one, must be a hollow and
vain tranquillity. One might indeed never learn the secret; it might
be the will of God simply to confront one with the desperate problem;
but a deep instinct in Hugh's heart told him that this could not be so;
and he determined that he, at all events, would go about the world as a
patient learner, grasping at any hint that was offered him, whether it
came by the waving of grasses on the waste, by the droop of
flower-laden boughs over a wall, from the strange horned insect that
crawled in the dust of the highway, or from the soft gaze of loving
eyes, flashing a message into the depths of his soul.
The pure faint lines of the wold that he saw from his window on the far
horizon, rising so peacefully above the level pasture-land, with the
hedgerow elms--what did they stand for? The mind reeled at the
thought. They were nothing but a gigantic cemetery. Every inch of
that soft chalk had been made up by the life and death, through
millions of years, of tiny insects, swimming, dying, mouldering in the
depths of some shapeless sea. Surely such a thought had a message for
his soul, not less real than the simpler and more direct message of
peace that the soft pale outlines, the gentle foldings of the hills,
seemed to lend his troubled spirit; in such a moment his faith rose
strong; he trod a shining track through the deeps of God.
XXX
Flowers--The Garden
The air that day was full of sunlight like fine gold, and put Hugh in
mind of _the city that was pure gold like unto clear glass!_--he had
often puzzled over that as a child; gold always seemed so opaque a
thing, a surface without depth; but, after all, it was true of the air
about him to-day--clear and transparent indeed, with a perfect clarity
and purity, and yet undoubtedly all tinged with lucent liquid gold. He
sate long on a bench in the college garden, a little paradise for the
eye and mind; it had been skilfully laid out, and Hugh used to think
that he had never seen a place so enlarged by art, where so much ground
went to the acre! All the outer edge of it was encircled by
trees--elms, planes, and limes; the borders, full of flowering shrubs,
were laid out in graceful curves, and in the centre was a great oval
bed of low-growing bushes, with the velvet turf all about it, sweeping
in sunlit vistas to left and right. It gave somehow a sense of space
and extent, achieved Hugh could not guess how. To-day all the edges of
the borders were full of flowers; and as he wandered among them he was
more than ever struck with a thought that had often come to him, the
mystery of flowers! The extraordinary variety of leaf and colour, the
whimsical shapes, the astonishing invention displayed, and yet an
invention of an almost childish kind. There was a clump of pink
blooms, such as a child might have amused itself with cutting out of
paper; here rose tall spires, with sharp-cut, serrated leaves at the
base; but the blue flowers on the stem were curiously lipped and
horned, more like strange insects than flowers. And then the stainless
freshness and delicacy of the texture, that a touch would soil! These
gracious things, uncurling themselves hour by hour, blooming, fading,
in obedience to the strange instinct of life, surprised him by a sudden
thrill. Here was a bed of irises, with smooth blade-like stalks, snaky
roots, the flowers of incredible shapes, yet no two exactly alike, all
splashed and dappled with the richest colours; and then the mixture of
blended fragrance; the hot, honied smell of the candytuft, with
aromatic spicy scents of flowers that he could not name. Here again
was the escholtzia, with its pointed horns, its bluish leaf, and the
delicate orange petals, yet with a scent, pure but acid, which almost
made one shudder. There was some mind behind it all, Hugh felt, but
what a mind! how leisurely, how fanciful, how unfathomable! For whose
pleasure were all these bright eccentric forms created? Certainly not
for the pleasure of man, for Hugh thought of the acres and acres of
wheat now rising in serried ranks in the deep country, with the poppies
or the marigolds among them, all quietly unfolding their bells of
scarlet flame, their round, sunlike faces, where no eye could see them,
except the birds that flew over. Could it be for God's own pleasure
that these flower shapes were made? they could not even see each other,
but rose in all their freshness, as by a subtle conspiracy, yet blind
to the world about them, conscious only of the sunlight and the rain,
with no imaginative knowledge, it would seem, or sympathy with their
brethren. It always filled Hugh with a sort of pity to think of the
sightless life of trees and flowers, each rising in its place, in
plain, on hill, and yet each enclosed within itself, with no
consciousness of its own beauty, and still less conscious of the beauty
of its fellows. And what was the life that animated them? Where did
it come from? Where did it pass to? Had they any sense of joy, of
sorrow? It was hard to believe that they had not. It always
distressed Hugh to see flowers gathered or boughs broken; it seemed a
hateful tyranny to treat these delicate creatures so for an hour's
pleasure. The sight of flowers picked and then thrown carelessly down
by the roadside, gave him a sense of helpless indignation. The idyllic
picture of children wandering in spring, filling their hands with
flower-heads torn from bank and copse, appeared to Hugh as only
painful. Man, from first to last, seemed to spread a ruthless
destruction around him. Hugh's windows overlooked a stream-bend much
frequented by fishermen; and it was a misery to him to see the poor
dace, that had lived so cool and merry a life in the dark pools of the
stream, poising and darting among the river-weed, hauled up struggling
to the air, to be greeted with a shout of triumph, and passed about,
dying and tortured, among the hot hands, in the thin, choking air. Was
that what God made them for? What compensation awaited them for so
horrible and shameful an end?
Hugh felt with a sigh that the mystery was almost unendurable, that God
should make, hour by hour, these curious and exquisite things, such as
flowers and fishes, and thrust them, not into a world where they could
live out a peaceful and innocent life, but into the midst of dangers
and miseries. Sometimes, beneath his windows, he could see a shoal of
little fish flick from the water in all directions at the rush of a
pike, one of them no doubt horribly engulphed in the monster's jaws.
Why was so hard a price to be paid for the delightful privilege of
life? Was it indifference or carelessness, as a child might make a
toy, and weary of it? It seemed like it, though Hugh could not bear to
think that it was so; and yet for thousands of centuries the same thing
had been going on all over the world, and no one seemed an inch nearer
to the mystery of it all. How such thoughts seemed to shrivel into
nothing the voluble religious systems that professed to explain it all!
The misery of it was that, here and everywhere, God seemed to be
explaining it Himself every day and hour, and yet one missed the
connection which could make it all intelligible--the connection, that
is, between God, as man in his heart conceived of Him, and God as He
wrote Himself large in every field and wood. On what hypothesis of
pure benevolence and perfect justice could all these restless lives, so
full of pain and suffering, and all alike ending in death and
disappearance, be explained?
Yet, stranger still, the mystery did not make him exactly unhappy. The
fresh breeze blew through the trees, the flowers blazed and shone in
the steady sun, the intricate lawns lay shimmering among the
shrubberies, and Hugh seemed full of a baffling and baffled joy. At
that moment, at all events, God wished him well, and spread for him the
exquisite pageant of life and colour and scent; the very sunshine stole
like some liquid essence along his veins, and filled him with
unreasoning happiness. And yet he too was encompassed by a thousand
dangers; there were a hundred avenues of sense, of emotion, by which
some dark messenger might steal upon him. Perhaps he lurked behind the
trees of that sweet paradise, biding his time to come forth. But
to-day it seemed a species of treachery to feel that anything but
active love and perfect benevolence was behind these smiling flowers,
those tall trees rippling in the breeze, that lucent sky. To-day at
least it seemed God's will that he should be filled with peaceful
content and gratitude. He would drink the cup of sweetness to-day
without retrospect or misgiving. Would the memory of that sweetness
stay his heart, and sustain his soul when the dark days came, when the
garden should be bare and dishevelled, and a strange dying smell should
hang about the walks; and when perhaps his own soul should be sorrowful
even unto death?
XXXI
A Man of Science--Prophets--A Tranquil Faith--Trustfulness
The perception of one of the great truths of personality came upon Hugh
in a summer day which he had spent, according to his growing
inclination, almost alone. In the morning he had done some business,
some writing, and had read a little. It was a week when Cambridge was
almost wholly given up to festivity, and the little river that flowed
beneath his house echoed all day long to the wash of boats, the stroke
of oars, and the cheerful talk of happy people. The streets were full
of gaily-dressed persons hurrying to and fro. This background of brisk
life pleased Hugh exceedingly, so long as he was not compelled to take
any part in it, so long as he could pursue his own reveries. Part of
the joy was that he could peep at it from his secure retreat; it
inspirited him vaguely, setting, as it were, a cheerful descant to the
soft melody of his own thoughts. In the afternoon he went out
leisurely into the country; it was pleasant to leave the humming town,
so full of active life and merry gossip, and to find that in the
country everything was going forward as though there were no pressure,
no bustle anywhere. The solitary figures of men hoeing weeds in among
the growing wheat, and moving imperceptibly across the wide green
fields, pleased him. He wound away through comfortable villages, among
elms and orchards, choosing the byways rather than the high-roads, and
plunging deeper and deeper into country which it seemed that no one
ever visited except on rustic business. There was a gentle south wind
which rippled in the trees; the foliage had just begun to wear its late
burnished look, and the meadows were full of high-seeded grass, gilded
or silvered with buttercups and ox-eye daisies.
He stopped for a time to explore a little rustic church, that stood, in
a careless mouldering dignity, in the centre of a small village. Here,
with his gentle fondness for little omens, he became aware that some
good thing was being prepared for him, for in the nave of the church,
under the eaves, he noted no less than three swarms of bees, that had
made their nest under the timbers of the roof, and were just awakening
into summer activity. The drones were being cast out of the hives, and
in an angle formed by the buttress of the church, Hugh found a small
lead cistern of water, which was a curious sight; it was all full of
struggling bees fallen from the roof above, either solitary bees who
had darted into the surface, and could not extricate themselves, or
drones with a working bee grappled, intent on pinching the life out of
the poor bewildered creature, the day of whose reckoning had come.
Hugh spent a long time in pulling the creatures out and setting them in
the sun, till at last he was warned by slanting shadows that the
evening was approaching, and he set off upon his homeward way.