science, who was engaged in a singular investigation. He kept a large
variety of fowls, and tried experiments in cross-breeding, noting
carefully in a register the plumage and physical characteristics of the
chickens. He had hired for the purpose a pleasant house, with a few
paddocks attached, where he kept his poultry. He invited Hugh to come
in, who in his leisurely mood gladly assented. The great man took him
round his netted runs, and discoursed easily upon the principles that
he was elucidating. He spoke with a mild enthusiasm; and it surprised
and pleased Hugh that a man of force and gravity should spend many
hours of every day in registering facts about the legs, the wattles,
and the feathers of chickens, and speak so gravely of the prospect of
infinite interest that opened before him. He said that he had worked
thus for some years, and as yet felt himself only on the fringe of the
subject. They walked about the big garden, where the evening sun lay
pleasantly on turf and borders of old-fashioned flowers; and with the
complacent delight with which a scientific man likes to show
experiments to persons who are engaged in childish pursuits such as
literature, the philosopher pointed out some other curiosities, as a
plant with a striped flower, whose stalk was covered with small red
protuberances, full of a volatile and aromatic oil, which, when a
lighted match was applied to them, sent off a little airy flame with a
dry and agreeable fragrance, as the tiny ignited cells threw out their
inflammable perfume.
Hugh was pleasantly entertained by these sights, and went home in a
very blithe frame of mind; a little later he sat down to write in his
own cool study. He was working at a task of writing which he had
undertaken, when a thought darted suddenly into his mind, suggested by
the image of the man of science who had beguiled an afternoon hour for
him. It was a complicated thought at first, but it grew clearer. He
perceived, as in a vision, humanity moving onwards to some unseen goal.
He took account, as from a great height, of all those who are in the
forefront of thought and intellectual movement. He saw them working
soberly and patiently in their appointed lines. He discerned that
though all these persons imagined that they had purposely taken up some
form of intellectual labour, and were pursuing it with a definite end
in view, they had really no choice in the matter, but were being led
along certain ways by as sure and faithful an instinct as the bees that
he had seen that day intent on their murderous business. Each of these
savants, in whatever line his labours lay, felt that he was striding
forward on a quest proposed, as he imagined, by himself. But Hugh saw,
with an inward certainty of vision, that the current which moved them
was one with which they could not interfere, and that it was but the
inner movement of some larger and wider mind which propelled them. He
saw too that many of his friends, men of practical learning, who were
occupied, with a deep sense of importance and concern, in accumulating
a little treasure of facts and inferences, in science, in history, in
language, in philosophy, were but led by an inner instinct, an
implanted taste, along the paths they supposed themselves to be
choosing and laboriously pursuing. They encouraged each other at
intervals by the bestowal of little honours and dignities; but at this
moment Hugh saw them as mere toilers; like the merchants who spend busy
and unattractive lives, sitting in noisy offices, acquiring money with
which to found a family, with the curious ambition that descendants of
their own, whom they could never see, should lead a pleasant life in
stately country-houses, intent upon shooting and games, on social
gatherings and petty business. He saw clearly that the merchant and
the philosopher alike had no clear idea of what they desired to effect,
but merely followed a path prepared and indicated. And then he saw
that the minds which were really in the forefront of all were the
poetical minds, the interpreters, the prophets, who saw, not in minute
detail, and in small definite sections, but with a wide and large view,
whither all this discovery, this investigation, was tending. The
investigation, worthless and minute enough in itself, as it seemed to
be when examined at a single point, had at least this value, that some
principle, some inspiration for life could be extracted from it,
something which would permeate slowly the thought of the world, set
pulses beating, kindle generous visions, and teach men ultimately the
lesson that, once learnt, puts life into a different plane, the lesson
that God is behind and over and in all things, and that it is His
purpose and not our own that is growing and ripening.
This mighty truth came home to Hugh that quiet afternoon with a
luminous certitude, a vast increase of hopefulness such as he had
seldom experienced before. But the thought in its infinite width
narrowed itself like a great stream that passes through a tiny sluice;
and Hugh saw what his own life was to be; that he must no longer form
plans and schemes, battle with uncongenial conditions, make foolish and
fretful efforts in directions in which he had no real strength or
force; but that his only vocation must lie in faithfully and simply
interpreting to himself and others this gigantic truth: the truth,
namely, that no one ought ever to indulge in gloomy doubts and
questionings about what his work in the world was to be, but that men
and women alike ought just to advance, quietly and joyfully, upon the
path so surely, so inevitably indicated to them. The more, he saw,
that one listens to this inner voice, the more securely does the
prospect open; by labour, not by fretful performance of disagreeable
duty, but by eager obedience to the constraining impulse, is the march
of the world accomplished. For some the path is quiet and joyful, for
some it is noisy and busy, for some it is dreary and painful; for some
it is even what we call selfish, cruel, and vile. But we must advance
along it whether we will or no. And it became clear to Hugh that the
more simply and clearly we feel this, the more will all the darker
elements of life drop away from the souls of men; for the darker
elements, the delays, the sorrows, the errors, are in vast measure the
shadows that come from our believing that it is we who cause and
originate, that our efforts and energies are valuable and useful. They
are both, when God is behind them; but when we strive to make them our
own, then their pettiness and insignificance are revealed.
It must not be said that Hugh never fell from this deep apprehension of
the truth. There were hours when he was haunted by the spectres of his
own unregenerate action, when he regretted mistakes, when he searched
for occupation; but he grew to see that even these sad hours only
brought out for him, with deeper and clearer significance, the
essential truth of the vision, which did indeed transform his life.
When he was ill, anxious, overwrought, he grew to feel that he was
being held quietly back for a season; and it led to a certain
deliberate disentangling of himself from the lesser human relations,
from a consciousness that his appointed work was not here, but that he
was set apart and consecrated for a particular work, the work of
apprehending and discerning, of interpreting and expressing, the vast
design of life; it represented itself to him in an image of children
wandering in fields and meadows, just observing the detail and the
petty connection of objects, the hedgerow, the stream appearing in
certain familiar places, by ford or bridge, the trees that loomed high
over the nearer orchard, and seemed part of it. And then one of these
children, he thought, might, on a day of surprises, be taken up to the
belfry of the old church-tower in the village, and out upon the roof.
Then in a moment the plan, the design of all would be made clear, the
hidden connection revealed. Those great towering elms, that rose in
soft masses above the orchard, were in reality nothing but the elms
that the child knew so well from the other side, that overhung his own
familiar garden. There, among the willows, the stream passed from ford
to bridge, and on again, circling in loops and curves. The village
would be a different place after that, not known by an empirical
experience, but apprehended as a construction, as a settled design,
where each field and garden had its appointed place.
And so Hugh, with a great effort of utter resignation, a resignation
which had something passionate and eager about it, cast himself into
the Father's hands, and prayed that he might no longer do anything but
discern and follow the path that was prepared for him. Long and late
these thoughts haunted him; but when he went at last through the silent
house to his own room, it was with a sense that he was reposing in
perfect trustfulness upon the will of One who, whether He led him
forward or held him back, knew with a deep and loving tenderness the
thing that he, and he only, could do in the great complicated world.
That world was now hushed in sleep. But the weir rushed and plunged in
the night outside; and over the dark trees that fringed the stream
there was a tender and patient light, that stole up from the rim of the
whirling globe, as it turned its weary sides, with punctual obedience,
to the burning light of the remote sun.
XXXII
Classical Education--Mental Discipline--Mental
Fertilisation--Poetry--The August Soul--The Secret of a Star--The Voice
of the Soul--Choice Studies--Alere Flammam
Hugh found that, as he grew older, he tended to read less, or rather
that he tended to recur more and more to the familiar books. He had
always been a rapid reader, and had followed the line of pure pleasure,
rather than pursued any scheme of self-improvement. He became aware,
particularly at Cambridge, that he was by no means a well-informed man,
and that his mind was very incompletely furnished. He was disposed to
blame his education for this, to a certain extent; it had been almost
purely classical; he had been taught a little science, a little
mathematics, and a little French; but the only history he had done at
school had been ancient history, to illustrate the classical authors he
had been reading; and the result had been a want of mental balance; he
knew nothing of the modern world or the movement of European history;
the whole education had in fact been linguistic and literary; it had
sacrificed everything to accuracy, and to the consideration of niceties
of expression. It might have been urged that this was in itself a
training in the art of verbal expression; but here it seemed to Hugh
that the whole of the training had confined itself to the momentary
effect, the ring of sentences, the adjustment of epithets, and that he
had received no sort of training in the art of structure. He had never
been made to write essays or to arrange his materials. He thought that
he ought to have been taught how to deal with a subject; but his
exercises had been almost wholly translations from ancient classical
languages. He had been taught, in fact, how to manipulate texture, but
never how to frame a design. The result upon his reading had been that
he had always been in search of phrases, of elegant turns of expression
and qualification, but he had never learnt how to apprehend the ideas
of an author. He had not cared to do this for himself, and from the
examination point of view it had been simply a waste of time. All that
he had ever tried to do had been so to familiarise himself with the
style, the idiosyncrasies of authors, that he might be able to
reproduce such superficial effects in his compositions, or to
disentangle a passage set for translation. He had not arrived at any
real mastery of either Greek or Latin, and it seemed to him, reflecting
on this process long afterwards, that the system had encouraged in him
a naturally faulty and dilettante bent in literature. In reading, for
instance, a dialogue of Plato, he had never cared to follow the
argument, but only to take pleasure in beautiful, isolated thoughts and
images; in reading a play of Sophocles, he had cared little about the
character-drawing or the development of the dramatic situation; he had
only striven to discover and recollect extracts of gnomic quality,
sonorous flights of rhetoric, illustrative similes.
The same tendency had affected all his own reading, which had lain
mostly in the direction of _belles-lettres_ and literary annals; and,
in the course of his official life, literature had been to him more a
beloved recreation than a matter of mental discipline. The result had
been that he found himself, in the days of his emancipation, with a
strong perception of literary quality, and a wide knowledge of poetical
and imaginative literature; he had, too, a considerable acquaintance
with the lives of authors; and this was all. He could read French with
facility, but with little appreciation of style. Both German and
Italian were practically unknown to him.
Hugh made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship, of a young
Fellow of a neighbouring college, whose education had been conducted on
entirely different lines. This young man had been educated privately,
his health making it impossible for him to go to school. He had read
only just enough classics to enable him to pass the requisite
examinations, and he had been trained chiefly in history and modern
languages. He had taken high honours in history at Cambridge, and had
settled down as a historical lecturer. As this friendship increased,
and as Hugh saw more and more of his friend's mind, he began to realise
his own deficiencies. His friend had an extraordinary grasp of
political and social movements. He was acquainted with the progress of
philosophy and with the development of ideas. It was a brilliant,
active, well-equipped intellect, moving easily and with striking
lucidity in the regions of accurate knowledge. Sometimes, in talking
to his friend, Hugh became painfully aware of the weakness of his own
slouching, pleasure-loving mind. It seemed to him that, in the
intellectual region, he was like a dusty and ragged tramp, permeated on
sunshiny days with a sort of weak, unsystematic contentment, dawdling
by hedgerow-ends and fountain-heads, lying in a vacant muse in grassy
dingles, and sleeping by stealth in the fragrant shadow of hayricks;
while his friend seemed to him to be a brisk gentleman in a furred
coat, flashing along the roads in a motor-car, full of useful activity
and pleasant business. His friend's idea of education was of a strict
and severe mental discipline; he did not over-estimate the value of
knowledge, but regarded facts and dates rather as a skilled workman
regards his bright and well-arranged tools. What he did above all
things value was a keen, acute, clear, penetrating mind, which arrayed
almost unconsciously the elements of a problem, and hastened unerringly
to a conclusion. The only point in which Hugh rated his own capacity
higher, was in a certain relish for literary effect. His friend was a
great reader, but Hugh felt that he himself possessed a power of
enjoyment, an appreciation of colour and melody, a thrilled delight in
what was artistically excellent, of which his friend seemed to have
little inkling.
His friend could classify authors, and could give off-hand a brilliant
and well-sustained judgment on their place in literary development,
which fairly astonished Hugh. But the difference seemed to be that his
friend had mastered books with a sort of gymnastic agility, and that
his mind had reached an astonishing degree of technical perfection
thereby; but Hugh felt that to himself books had been a species of
food, and that his heart and spirit had gained some intensity from
them, some secret nourishment, which his friend had to a certain extent
missed.
Hugh had been so stirred on several occasions by a sense of shame at
realising the impotence and bareness of his own mind, that he laid down
an ambitious scheme of self-improvement, and attacked history with a
zealous desire for his own mental reform. But he soon discovered that
it was useless. Such an effort might have been made earlier in life,
before habits had been formed of desultory enjoyment, but it was in
vain now. He realised that accurate knowledge simply fell through his
mind like a shower of sand; a little of it lodged on inaccessible
ledges, but most of it was spilt in the void. He saw that his only
hope was to strengthen and enlarge his existing preferences, and that
the best that he could hope to arrive at was to classify and
systematise such knowledge as he at present possessed. It was too late
to take a new departure, or to aim at any completeness of view. The
mental discipline that he required, and of which he felt an urgent
need, must be attained by a diligent sorting of his own mental stores,
haphazard and disjointed as they were. And after all, he felt, there
was room in the world for many kinds of minds. Mental discipline from
the academical point of view was a very important thing, perhaps the
thing that the ordinary type of public schoolboy was most in need of.
But there was another province too, the province of mental
appreciation, and it was in this field that Hugh felt himself competent
to labour. It seemed to him that there were many young men at the
university, capable of intellectual pleasure, who had been starved by
the at once diffuse and dignified curriculum of classical education.
Hugh felt that he himself had been endowed with an excess of the
imaginative and artistic quality, and that, owing to natural instincts
and intellectual home-surroundings, he had struck out a path for
himself; books had been to Hugh from his earliest years channels of
communication with other minds. He could not help doubting whether
they ever developed qualities or delights that did not naturally exist
in a rudimentary form in the mind which fell under their influences.
He could not, in looking back, trace the originating power of any book
on his own mind; the ideas of others had rather acted in fertilising
the germs which lay dormant in his own heart. They had deepened the
channels of his own thoughts, they had revealed him to himself; but
there had always been, he thought, an unconscious power of selection at
work; so that uncongenial ideas, unresponsive thoughts, had merely
danced off the surface without affecting any lodgment. He had gained
in taste and discrimination, but he could not trace any impulse from
literature which had set him exploring a totally unfamiliar region.
Sometimes he had resolutely submitted his mind to the leadership of a
new author; but he had always known in his heart that the pilgrimage
would be in vain. He felt that he would have gained if he had known
this more decisively, and if he had spent his energies more faithfully
in pursuing what was essentially congenial to him.
There were certain authors, certain poets who, he had instinctively
felt from the outset, viewed life, nature, and art from the same
standpoint as himself. His mistake had been in not defining that
standpoint more clearly, but in wandering vaguely about, seeking for a
guide, for way-posts, for beaten tracks. What he ought to have done
was to have fixed his eyes upon the goal, and fared directly thither.
But this misdirected attempt, over which he wasted some precious
months, to enlarge the horizon of his mind, had one valuable effect.
It revealed to him at last what the object of his search was. He
became aware that he was vowed to the pursuit of beauty, of a definite
and almost lyrical kind. He saw that his mind was not made to take in,
with a broad and vigorous sweep, the movement of human endeavour; he
saw that he had no conception of wide social or political forces, of
the development of communities, of philosophical ideals. These were
great and high things, and his studies gave him an increased sense of
their greatness and significance. But Hugh saw that he could neither
be a historian nor a philosopher, but that his work must be of an
individualistic type. He saw that the side of the world which appealed
to himself was the subtle and mysterious essence of beauty--the beauty
of nature, of art, of music, of comradeship, of relations with other
souls. The generalisations of science had often a great poetical
suggestiveness; but he had no vestige of the scientific temper which is
content to deduce principles from patient and laborious investigation.
He saw that his own concern must be with the emotions and the hearts of
his fellows, rather than with their minds; that if he possessed any
qualities at all, they were of a poetical kind. The mystery of the
world was profound and dark, though Hugh could see that science was
patiently evolving some order out of the chaos. But the knowledge of
the intricate scheme was but a far-off vision, an august hope; and
meanwhile men had to meet life as they could, to evolve enough
hopefulness, enough inspiration from their complicated conditions to
enable them to live a full and vigorous life.
Poetry, to give a large name to the various interpretations of subtle
beauty, could offer in some measure that hope, that serenity; could
lend the dignity to life which scientific investigations tended to
sweep away. Science seemed to reveal the absolute pettiness, the
minute insignificance of all created things, to show how inconsiderable
a space each separate individual occupied in the sum of forces; the
thought weighed heavily upon Hugh that he was only as the tiniest of
the drops of water in a vast cataract that had rushed for thousands of
years to the sea; it was a paralysing conception. It was true that the
water-drop had a definite place; yet it was the outcome and the victim
of monstrous forces; it leapt from the mountain to the river, it ran
from the river to the sea; it was spun into cloud-wreaths; it fell on
the mountain-top again; it was perhaps congealed for centuries in some
glacier-bed; then it was free again to pursue its restless progress.
But to feel that one was like that, was an unutterably dreary and
fatiguing thought. The weary soul perhaps was hurried thus from zone
to zone of life, never satisfied, never tranquil; with a deep instinct
for freedom and tranquillity, yet never tranquil or free. Then, into
this hopeless and helpless prospect, came the august message of poetry,
revealing the transcendent dignity, the solitariness, the majesty of
the indomitable soul; bidding one remember that though one was a humble
atom in a vast scheme, yet one had the sharp dividing sense of
individuality; that each individual was to himself the measure of all
things, a fortress of personality; that one was not merely whirled
about in a mechanical order; but that each man was as God Himself, able
to weigh and survey the outside scheme of things, to approve and to
disapprove; and that the human will was a mysterious stronghold,
impregnable, secure, into which not even God Himself could intrude
unsummoned. How small a thing to the eye of the scientist were the
human passions and designs, the promptings of instinct and nature; but
to the eye of the poet how sublime and august! These tiny creatures
could be dominated by emotions--love, honour, patriotism,
liberty--which could enable them, frail and impotent as they were, to
rise majestically above the darkest and saddest limitations of
immortality. They could be racked with pain, crushed, tormented,
silenced; but nothing could make them submit, nothing could force them
to believe that their pains were just. Herein lay the exceeding
dignity of the human soul, that it could arraign its Creator before its
own judgment-seat, and could condemn Him there. It could not, it
seemed, refuse to be called into being, but, once existent, it could
obey or not as it chose. Its joys might be clouded, its hopes
shattered, but it need not acquiesce; and this power of rebellion, of
criticism, of questioning, seemed to Hugh one of the most astonishing
and solemn things in the world. And thus to Hugh the history of the
individual, the aspirations and longings of mankind, seemed to contain
a significance, a sanctity that nothing could remove.