this did not lessen his astonishment at the fact that the human soul
could claim a right to decide, by its own intuitions, what was just and
what was unjust, and could accuse the Eternal Lord of Life of not
showing it enough of the problem for it to be able to acquiesce in the
design, as it desired to do. Hugh believed that he was justified in
holding that as Love was the strongest power in the world, the Creator
and Inspirer of that love probably represented that quality in the
supremest degree, though this was an inference only, and not supported
by all the phenomena of things. But it seemed to him the one clue
through the darkness; and this secret hope was perhaps the highest and
best thought that came to him from searching the records of humanity
and the conceptions of mortal minds.
And therefore Hugh felt that he was on the side of the individual; and
that he touched life in that relation. Literature then must be for
him, in some form or other, an attempt to quicken the individual pulse,
to augment the individual sense of significance. He must abstain from
what was probably a higher work; but he must not lose faith thereby.
He must set himself with all his might to preach a gospel of beauty to
minds which, like his own, were incapable of the larger mental sweep,
and could only hope to disentangle the essence of the moment, to refine
the personal sensation. That was the noble task of high literature, of
art, of music, of the contemplation of nature, that it could give the
mind a sense of largeness, of dim and wistful hope, of ultimate
possibilities. The star that hung in the silent heaven--it was true
that it was the creation of mighty forces, that it had a place, a
system, a centrifugal energy, a radiation of its own. That was in a
sense the message of a star; but it had a further appeal, too, to the
imaginative mind, in that it hung a glowing point of ageless light,
infinitely remote, intolerably mysterious, a symbol of all the lustrous
energies of the aspiring soul. And in one sense indeed the pure
imagination could invest such vast creatures of God with even a finer,
freer charm than scientific apprehension. Science could indicate its
bulk, its motions, its distance, even analyse its very bones; but it
could do no more; while the spirit could glide, as in an aerial
chariot, through the darkness of the impalpable abyss, draw nearer and
nearer in thought to the vast luminary, see unscathed its prodigious
vents spouting flame and smoke, and hear the roar of its furnaces; or
softly alight upon fields of dark stones, and watch with awe the
imagined progress of forms intolerably huge, swollen as with the
bigness of nightmare. Here was the strange contrast, that science was
all on fire to learn the truth; while the incomprehensible essence of
the soul, with its limitless visions, was capable of forming
conceptions which the truth should disappoint. And here again came in
a strange temptation. If life and identity were to be indefinitely
prolonged, then Hugh had no wish but to draw nearer to the truth,
however hard and even unpalatable it might be; but if, on the other
hand, this life were all, then it seemed that one might be even the
happier for comfortable and generous delusions.
Hugh, then, felt that if the old division of more highly developed
minds was the true one; if one was either Aristotelian or Platonist,
that is to say, if one's tendencies were either scientific or
idealistic, there was no doubt on which side of the fight he was
arrayed; not that he thought of the two tendencies as antagonistic; and
if indeed the scientific mind tended to contemn the idealistic mind, as
concerning itself with fancies rather than with facts, he felt that
there could not be a greater mistake than for the idealistic mind to
contemn the scientific. Rather, he thought, the idealists should use
the scientific toilers as patient, humble, and serviceable people, much
as the Dorian conquerors of Sparta used the Helots, and encourage them
to perform the necessary and faithful work of investigation for which
the idealists were unfitted. The mistake which men of scientific
temper made, Hugh thought, was to concern themselves only or mainly,
with material phenomena. The idealistic and imaginative tendencies of
man were just as much realities, and no amount of materialism could
obliterate them. What was best of all was to import if possible a
scientific temper into idealistic matters; not to draw hasty or
insecure generalisations, nor to neglect phenomena however humble.
Books then for Hugh were, in their largest aspect, indications and
manifestations of the idealistic nature of man. The interest about
them was the perceiving of the different angles at which a thought
struck various minds, the infusion of personality into them by
individuals, the various interpretations which they put upon
perceptions, the insight into various kinds of beauty and hopefulness
which the writers displayed.
And thus Hugh turned more and more away from the critical apprehension
of imaginative literature, to the mystical apprehension of it. A
critical apprehension of it was indeed necessary, for it initiated one
into the secrets of expression and of structure, in which the force of
personality was largely displayed, taking shape from the thought in
them, as clothes take shape from their wearers. But deeper still lay
the mystical interpretation. In the world of books he heard the voice
of the soul, sometimes lamenting in desolate places, sometimes singing
blithely to itself, as a shepherd sings upon a headland, in sight of
the blue sea; sometimes there came a thrill of rapture into the voice,
when the spirit was filled to the brim with the unclouded joys of the
opening world, the scent of flowers, the whispering of foliage in great
woods, the sweet harmonies of musical chords, the glance of beloved
eyes, or the accents of some desired voice; and then again all this
would fade and pale, and the soul would sit wearied out, lamenting its
vanished dreams and the delicate delights of the springtime, in some
wild valley overhung with dark mountains, under the dreadful and
inscrutable eye of God. Life, how insupportable, how beautiful it
seemed! Full of treasures and terrors alike, its joys and its woes
alike unutterable. The strangest thing of all, that the mind of man
was capable of seeing that there was a secret, a mystery about it all;
could desire so passionately to know it and to be satisfied, and yet
forbidden even dimly to discern its essence.
What, after all, Hugh reflected, was the end of reading? Not erudition
nor information, though many people seemed to think that this was a
meritorious object. Professed historians must indeed endeavour to
accumulate facts, and to arrive if possible at a true estimate of
tendencies and motives; the time had not yet come, said the most
philosophical historians, for any deductions to be drawn as to the
development of the mind of the world, the slow increase of knowledge
and civilisation; and yet that was the only ultimate value of their
work, to attempt, namely, to arrive at the complex causes and
influences that determined the course of history and progress. Hugh
felt instinctively that his mind, impatient, inaccurate, subtle rather
than profound, was ill adapted for such work as this. He felt that it
was rather his work to arrive, if he could, at a semi-poetical,
semi-philosophical interpretation of life, and to express this as
frankly as he could. And thus reading must be for him an attempt to
refine and quicken his insight into the human mind, working in the more
delicate regions of art. He must study expression and personality; he
must keep his spirit sensitive to any hint of truth or beauty, any
generous and ardent intuition, any grace and seemliness of thought. He
was fond of books of travel, as opening to him a larger perspective of
human life, and revealing to him the conclusions to which experience
and life had brought men of other nationalities and other creeds.
Biography was his most beloved study, because it opened out to him the
vast complexity of human motive; but he thought that its chief value
had been in revealing to him the extraordinary part that conventional
and adopted beliefs and motives played in the majority of lives.
His reading, then, began to have for him a deep and special
significance. He was no philosopher; he found that the metaphysical
region, where one stumbled among the dim ultimate causes of things,
only gave him a sense of insecurity and despair; but he was in a sense
a psychologist; his experience of life had taught him to have an
inkling of the influences that affect character, and still more of the
stubborn power of character in resisting influences. Poetry was to him
a region in which one became aware of strange and almost magical
forces, which came floating out of unknown and mysterious depths--it
was a world of half-heard echoes, momentary glimpses, mysterious
appeals. In history and in biography one saw more of the interacting
forces of temperament; but in poetry, as the interpreter of nature, one
found oneself among cries and thrills which seemed to rise from the
inner heart of the world. It was the same with religion; but here the
forces at work so often lost their delicacy and subtlety by being
compounded with grosser human influences, entangled with superstitions,
made to serve low and pitiful ends. In poetry there was none of
this--it was the most disinterested thing in the world. In the pure
medium of words, coloured by beauty and desire, all the remote, holy,
sweet secrets of the heart were blended into a rising strain; and it
was well to submit oneself, tranquilly and with an open heart, to the
calling of these sweet voices.
Hugh was aware that his view was not what would be called a practical
one; that he had no fibre of his being that responded to what were
called civic claims, political urgencies, social reforms, definite
organisations; he felt increasingly that these things were but the
cheerful efforts of well-meaning and hard-headed persons to deal with
the bewildering problems, the unsatisfactory debris of life. Hugh felt
that the only possible hope of regeneration and upraising lay in the
individual; and that if the tone of individual feeling could be
purified and strengthened, these organisations would become mere
unmeaning words. The things that they represented seemed to Hugh
unreal and even contemptible, the shadows cast on the mist by the evil
selfishnesses, the stupid appetites, the material hopes of men. As
simplicity of life and thought became more and more dear to him, he
began to recognise that, though there was no doubt room in the world,
as it was, for these other busy and fertile ideas, yet that his own
work did not lie there. Rather it lay in defining and classifying his
own life and experience; in searching for indubitable motives, and
noble possibilities that had almost the force of certainties; of
gathering up the secrets of existence, and speaking them as frankly, as
ardently, as melodiously as his powers would admit, if by any means he
might awaken other hearts to the truths which had for him so sweet and
constraining an influence.
XXXIII
Music--Church Music--Musicians--The Organ--False Asceticism
An art which had for Hugh an almost divine quality was the art of
music; an art dependent upon such frail natural causes, the vibration
of string and metal, yet upon the wings of which the soul could fly
abroad further than upon the wings of any other art. There was a
little vignette of Bewick's, which he had loved as a child, where a
minute figure sits in a tiny horned and winged car, in mid air,
throwing out with a free gesture the reins attached to the bodies of a
flight of cranes; the only symbol of his destination a crescent moon,
shining in dark skies beyond him. That picture had always seemed to
Hugh a parable of music, that it gave one power to fly upon the regions
of the upper air, to use the wings of the morning.
And yet, if one analysed it, what a totally inexplicable pleasure it
was. Part of it, the orderly and rhythmical beat of metre, such as
comes from striking the fingers on the table, or tapping the foot upon
the floor; how deep lay the instinct to bring into strict sequence,
where it was possible, the mechanical movements of nature, the creaking
of the boughs of trees, the drip of water from a fountain-lip, the beat
of rolling wheels, the recurrent song of the thrush on the high tree;
and then there came in the finer sense of intricate vibration. The
lower notes of great organ-pipes had little indeed but a harsh roar,
that throbbed in the leaded casements of the church; but climbing
upwards they took shape in the delicate noises, the sounds and sweet
airs of which Prospero's magic isle was full. And yet the rapture of
it was inexpressible in words. Sometimes those airy flights of notes
seemed to stimulate in some incomprehensible way the deepest emotions
of the human spirit; not indeed the intellectual and moral emotions,
but the primal and elemental desires and woes of the heart.
Hugh could hardly say in what region of the soul this all took place.
It seemed indeed the purest of all emotions, for the mind lost itself
in a delight which hardly even seemed to be sensuous at all, because,
in the case of other arts, one was conscious of pleasure, conscious of
perception, of mingling identity with the thing seen or perceived; but
in music one was rapt almost out of mortality, in a kind of bodiless
joy.
One of Hugh's causes of dissatisfaction with the education he had
received was that, though he had a considerable musical gift, he had
never been taught to play any musical instrument. Partly indolence and
partly lack of opportunity had prevented him from attaining any measure
of skill by his own exertions, though he had once worked a little, very
fitfully, at the theory of music, and had obtained just enough
knowledge of the composition of chords to give him an intelligent
pleasure in disentangling the elements of simple progressions. Another
trifling physical characteristic had prevented his hearing as much
music as he would have wished. The presence of a crowd, the heat and
glare of concert-rooms, the uncomfortable proximity of unsympathetic or
possibly even loquacious persons, combined with a dislike of fixed
engagements outside of the pressure of official hours of work, had kept
him, very foolishly, from musical performances. Thus almost the only
music with which he had a solid acquaintance was ecclesiastical music;
he had been accustomed as a boy to frequent the cathedral services in
the town where he was at school; and in London he constantly went on
Sundays to St. Paul's or Westminster. It was no doubt the stately
_mise-en-scene_ of these splendid buildings that affected Hugh as much
even as the music itself, though the music was like the soul's voice
speaking gently from beautiful lips. Hugh always, if he could,
approached St. Paul's by a narrow lane among tall houses, that came out
opposite the north transept. At a certain place the grey dome became
visible, strangely foreshortened, like a bleak mountain-head, and then
there appeared, framed by the house-fronts, the sculptured figure of
the ancient lawgiver, with a gesture at once vehement and dignified,
that crowned the top of the pediment. Then followed the hush of the
mighty church, the dumb falling of many foot-falls upon the floor, the
great space of the dome, in which the mist seemed to float, the liberal
curves, the firm proportions of arch and pillar; the fallen daylight
seemed to swim and filter down, stained with the tincture of dim hues;
the sounds of the busy city came faintly there, a rich murmur of life;
then the soft hum of the solemn bell was heard, in its vaulted cupola;
and then the organ awoke, climbing from the depth of the bourdon; the
movement of priestly figures, the sweet order of the scene, the sense
of high solemnity, made a shrine for the holy spirit of beauty to utter
its silvery voice. In Westminster it was different; the richer
darkness, the soaring arches, the closer span, the incredible treasure
of association and memory made it a more mysterious place, but the
sound lacked the smothered remoteness that gave such a strange,
repressed economy to the music of St. Paul's. At Westminster it was
more cheerful, more tangible, more material. But the tranquillising,
the inspiring effect upon the spirit was the same. Perhaps it was not
technical religion of which Hugh was in search. But it was the
religion which was as high above doctrine and creed and theology as the
stars were above the clouds. The high and holy spirit inhabiting
eternity seemed to emerge from the metaphysic, the science of religion,
from argument and strife and dogma, as the moon wades, clear and cold,
out of the rack of dusky vapours. Such a voice, as that gentle,
tender, melancholy, and still joyful voice, that speaks in the 119th
Psalm, telling of misunderstanding and persecution, and yet dwelling in
a further region of peace, came speeding into the very labyrinth of
Hugh's troubled heart. "I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost;
O seek thy servant, for I do not forget Thy commandments." It was not
inspiration, not a high-hearted energy, that music brought with it; it
was rather a reconciliation of all that hurt or jarred the soul, an
earnest of intended peace.
But, after all, this was not music pure and simple; it was music set in
a rich frame of both sensuous and spiritual emotions. Hugh realised
that music had never played a large part in his life, but had been one
of many artistic emotions that had spoken to him in divers manners.
There was one fact about music which lessened its effect upon Hugh, and
that was the fact that it seemed to depend more than other arts upon
what one brought to it. In certain moods, particularly melancholy
moods, when the spirit was fevered by dissatisfaction or sorrow, its
appeal was irresistible; it came flying out of the silence, like an
angel bearing a vial of fragrant blessings. It came flooding in, like
the cool brine over scorched sands, smoothing, refreshing, purifying.
There seemed something direct, authentic, and divine about the message
of music in such moods; there seemed no interfusion of human
personality to distract, because the medium was more pure.
Sometimes, for weeks together at Cambridge, Hugh would go without
hearing any music at all, until an almost physical thirst would fall
upon him. In such an arid mood, he would find himself tyrannously
affected by any chance fragment of music wafted past him; he would go
to some cheerful party, where, after the meal was over, a piano would
be opened, and a simple song sung or a short piece played. This would
come like a draught of water to a weary traveller, bearing Hugh away
out of his surroundings, away from gossip and lively talk, into a
remote and sheltered place; it was like opening a casement from a
familiar and lighted room, and leaning out over a dim land, where the
sunset was slowly dying across the rim of the tired world.
Hugh always found it easy to make friends with musicians. They
generally seemed to him to be almost a race apart; their art seemed to
withdraw them in a curious way from the world, and to absorb into
itself the intellectual vigour which was as a rule, with ordinary men,
distributed over a variety of interests. He knew some musicians who
were men of wide cultivation, but they were very much the exception; as
a rule, they seemed to Hugh to be a simple and almost childlike
species, fond of laughter and elementary jests, with emotions rather
superficial than deep, and not regarding life from the ordinary
standpoint at all. The reason lay, Hugh believed, in the nature of the
medium in which they worked; the writer and the artist were brought
into direct contact with humanity; it was their business to interpret
life, to investigate emotion; but the musician was engaged with an art
that was almost mathematical in its purity and isolation; he worked
under the strictest law, and though it required a severe and strong
intellectual grip, it was not a process which had any connection with
emotions or with life. But Hugh always felt himself to be inside the
charmed circle, and though he knew but little of the art, musical talk
always had a deep interest for him, and he seemed to divine and
understand more than he could explain or express.
But still it was true that music had played no part in his intellectual
development; he had never approached it on that side; it had merely
ministered to him at intervals a species of emotional stimulus; it had
seemed to him to speak a language, dim and unintelligible, but the
purport of which he interpreted to be somehow high and solemn. There
seemed indeed to be nothing in the world that spoke in such mysterious
terms of an august destiny awaiting the soul. The origin, the very
elements of the joy of music were so absolutely inexplicable. There
seemed to be no assignable cause for the fact that the mixture of
rhythmical progress and natural vibration should have such a singular
and magical power over the human soul, and affect it with such
indescribable emotion.
He had sometimes seen, half with amusement, half with a far deeper
interest, the physical effect which the music of some itinerant
piano-organ would produce upon street children; they seemed affected by
some curious intoxication; their gestures, their smiles, their
self-conscious glances, their dancing movements, so unnatural in a
sense, and yet so instinctive, made the process appear almost magical
in its effects. Though it did not affect him so personally, it seemed
to have a similarly intoxicating effect on Hugh's own mind. Even if
the particular piece that he was listening to had no appeal to his
spirit, even if it were only a series of lively cascades of tripping
notes, his thoughts, he found, took on an excited, an irrepressible
tinge. But if on the other hand the time and the mood were favourable,
if the piece were solemn or mournful, or of a melting sweetness, it
seemed for a moment to bring a sense of true values into life, to make
him feel, by a silent inspiration, the rightness and the perfection of
the scheme of the world.
One evening a friend of Hugh's, who was organist of one of the
important college chapels, took him and a couple of friends into the
building. It had been a breathlessly hot summer day, but the air
inside had a coolness and a peace which revived the languid frame. It
was nearly dark, but the great windows smouldered with deep fiery
stains, and showed here and there a pale face, or the outline of a
mysterious form, or an intricacy of twined tabernacle-work. Only a
taper or two were lit in the shadowy choir; and a light in the
organ-loft sent strange shadows, a waving hand or a gigantic arm,
across the roof, while the quiet movements of the player were heard
from time to time, the passage of his feet across the gallery, or the
rustling of the leaves of a book. Hugh and his friends seated
themselves in the stalls; and then for an hour the great organ uttered
its voice--now a soft and delicate strain, a lonely flute or a languid
reed outlining itself upon the movement of the accompaniment; or at
intervals the symphony worked up to a triumphant outburst, the trumpets
crashing upon the air, and a sudden thunder outrolling; the great
pedals seeming to move, like men walking in darkness, treading warily
and firmly; until the whole ended with a soft slow movement of perfect
simplicity and tender sweetness, like the happy dying of a very old and
honourable person, who has drunk his fill of life and blessings, and
closes his eyes for very weariness and gladness, upon labour and praise
alike.