tranquil reflection one seemed to have harmonised and explained life,
joy and disaster alike, to have wound up a clue, to have brought it all
to a peaceful and perfect climax of silence, like a tale that is told;
and then it was necessary to go out to the world again with all its
bitterness, its weariness, its dissatisfaction--till one almost
wondered whether it was wise or brave to have chased and captured this
strange phantom of imagined peace.
Yes, it was wise sometimes, Hugh felt sure! to have refused it would
have been like refusing to drink from a cool and bubbling wayside
spring, as one fared on a hot noon over the shimmering
mountain-side--refused, in a spirit of false austerity, for fear that
one would thirst again through the dreary leagues ahead. As long as
one remembered that it was but an imagined peace, that one had not
attained it, it was yet well to remember that the peace was real, that
it existed somewhere, even though it was still shut within the heart of
God. However slow the present progress, however long the road, it was
possible to look forward in hope, to know that one would move more
blithely and firmly when the time should come for the desired peace to
be given one more abundantly; it helped one, as one stumbled and
lingered, to look a little further on, and to say, "I will run the way
of Thy commandments, when Thou hast set my heart at liberty."
XXXIV
Pictorial Art--Hand and Soul--Turner--Raphael--Secrets of Art
Hugh's professional life had given him little opportunity for indulging
artistic tastes. He had been very fond as a boy of sketching,
especially architectural subjects; it had trained his powers of
observation; but there had come a time when, as a young man, he had
deliberately laid his sketching aside. The idea in his mind had been
that if one desired to excel in any form of artistic expression, one
must devote all one's artistic faculty to that. He had been conscious
of a certain diffuseness of taste, a love of music and a love of
pictorial art being both strong factors in his mind; but he was also
dimly conscious that he matured slowly; that he had none of the facile
grasp of difficult things which characterised some of his more able
companions; his progress was always slow, and he arrived at mastery
through a long wrestling with inaccuracy and half knowledge; his
perception was quick, but his grasp feeble, while his capacity for
forgetting and losing his hold on things was great. He therefore made
a deliberate choice in the matter, guided, he now felt, rather by a
kind of intuition than by any very definite principle, and determined
to restrict his artistic energies to a single form of art. His father,
he remembered, had remonstrated with him, and had said that by giving
up sketching he was sacrificing a great resource of recreation and
amusement. He had no answer at the time to the criticism, but it
seemed to him that he knew his own mind in the matter, and that as he
could not hope, he thought, to attain to any real excellence in
draughtsmanship, it had better be cut off altogether, and his energies,
such as they were--he knew that the spring was not a copious
one--confined to a more definite channel.
As life went on, and as time became more and more precious, as his
literary work more and more absorbed him, he drew away from the
artistic region; in his early years of manhood he had travelled a good
deal, and the seeing of pictures had always been part of the programme;
but his work became heavier, and the holidays had tended more and more
to be spent in some quiet English retreat, where he could satisfy his
delight in nature, and re-read some of the old beloved books. A
certain physical indolence was also a factor, an indolence which made
wandering in a picture-gallery always rather a penance; but he
contrived at intervals to go and look at pictures in London in a
leisurely way, both old and new; and he had one or two friends who
possessed fine works of art, which could be enjoyed calmly and quietly.
He was aware that he was losing some catholicity of mind by this--but
he knew his limitations, and more and more became aware that his
constitutional energy was not very great, and needed to be husbanded.
He was quite aware that he was not what would be called a cultivated
person, that his knowledge both of art and music was feeble and
amateurish; but he saw, or thought he saw, that people of wide
cultivation often sacrificed in intensity what they gained in width;
and as he became gradually aware that the strongest faculty he
possessed was the literary faculty, he saw that he could not hope to
nourish it without a certain renunciation. He had no taste for
becoming an expert or a connoisseur; he had not the slightest wish to
instruct other people, or to arrive at a technical and professional
knowledge of art. He was content to leave it to be a rare luxury, a
thing which, when the opportunity and the mood harmonised, could open a
door for him into a beautiful world of dreams. He was quite aware that
he often liked what would be called the wrong things; but what he was
on the look-out for in art was not technical perfection or finished
skill, but a certain indefinable poetical suggestion, which pictures
could give him, when they came before him in certain moods. The mood,
indeed, mattered more than the picture; moreover it was one of the
strangest things about pictorial art, that the work of certain artists
seemed able to convey poetical suggestion, even when the poetical
quality seemed to be absent from their own souls. He knew a certain
great artist well, who seemed to Hugh to be an essentially
materialistic man, fond of sport and society, of money, and the
pleasures that money could buy, who spoke of poetical emotion as
moonshine, and seemed frankly bored by any attempt at the mystical
apprehension of beautiful things, who could yet produce, by means of
his mastery of the craft, pictures full of the tenderest and loveliest
emotion and poetry. Hugh tried hard to discern this quality in the
man's soul, tried to believe that it was there, and that it was
deliberately disguised by a pose of bluff unaffectedness. But he came
to the conclusion that it was not there, and that the painter achieved
his results only by being able to represent with incredible fidelity
the things in nature that held the poetical quality. On the other hand
he had a friend of real poetical genius, who was also an artist, but
who could only produce the stiffest and hardest works of art, that had
no quality about them except the quality of tiresome definiteness.
This was a great mystery to Hugh; but it ended eventually, after a
serious endeavour to appreciate what was approved by the general
verdict to be of supreme artistic value, in making him resolve that he
would just follow his own independent taste, and discern whatever
quality of beauty he could, in such art as made an appeal to him. Thus
he was not even an eclectic; he was a mere amateur; he treated art just
as a possible vehicle of poetical suggestion, and allowed it to speak
to him when and where it could and would.
He had moreover a great suspicion of conventionality in taste. A man
of accredited taste often seemed to him little more than a man who had
the faculty of admiring what it was the fashion to admire. Hugh had
been for a short time under the influence of Ruskin, and had tried
sincerely to see the magnificence of Turner, and to loathe the
artificiality of Claude Lorraine. But when he arrived at his more
independent attitude, he found that there was much to admire in Claude;
that exquisite golden atmosphere, suffusing a whole picture with an
evening glow, enriching the lavish foreground, and touching into
romantic beauty headland after headland, that ran out, covered with
delicate woodland, into the tranquil lake; those ruinous temples with a
quiet flight of birds about them; the mysterious figures of men
emerging from the woods on the edges of the water, bent serenely on
some simple business, had the magical charm; and then those faint
mountains closing the horizon, all rounded with the golden haze of
evening, seemed to hold, in their faintly indicated heights and folds,
a delicate peace, a calm repose, as though glad just to be, just to
wait in that reposeful hour for the quiet blessing of waning light, the
sober content so richly shed abroad. It was not criticism, Hugh
thought, to say that it was all impossibly combined, falsely conceived.
It was not, perhaps, a transcript of any one place or one hour; but it
had an inner truth for all that; it had the spirit of evening with its
pleasant weariness, its gentle recollection, its waiting for repose; or
it had again the freshness of the morning, the vital hope that makes it
delightful to rise, to cast off sleep, to go abroad, making light of
the toil and heat that the day is to bring.
And then, in studying Turner, he learnt to see that, lying intermingled
with all the power and nobility of much of his work, there was a
displeasing extravagance, a violence, a faultiness of detail, an
exaggeration that often ruined his pictures. Neither he nor Claude
were true to life; but there was an insolence sometimes about Turner's
variation from fact, which made him shudder. How he seemed sometimes,
in his pictures of places familiar to Hugh--such, for instance, as the
drawing of Malham Cove--to miss, by his heady violence, all the real,
the essential charm of the place. Nature was not what Turner depicted
it; and he did not even develop and heighten its beauty, but
substituted for the real charm an almost grotesque personal mannerism.
Turner's idea of nature seemed to Hugh often purely theatrical and
melodramatic, wanting in restraint, in repose. The appeal of Turner
seemed to him to be constantly an appeal to childish and unperceptive
minds, that could not notice a thing unless it was forced upon them.
Some of the earlier pictures indeed, such as that of the frost-bound
lane, with the boy blowing on his fingers, and the horses nibbling at
the stiff grass, with the cold light of the winter's dawn coming slowly
up beyond the leafless hedge, seemed to him to be perfectly beautiful;
but the Turner of the later period, the Turner so wildly upheld by
Ruskin, seemed to Hugh to have lost sight of nature, in the pleasure of
constructing extravagant and fantastic schemes of colour. The true art
seemed to Hugh not to be the art that trumpets beauty aloud, and that
drags a spectator roughly to admire; but the art that waits quietly for
the sincere nature-lover, and gives a soft hint to which the soul of
the spectator can add its own emotion. To Hugh it was much a matter of
mood. He would go to a gallery of ancient or modern art, and find that
there many pictures had no message or voice for him; and then some
inconspicuous picture would suddenly appeal to him with a mysterious
force--the pathetic glance of childish eyes, or an old face worn by
toil and transfigured by some inner light of hopefulness; or a woodland
scene, tree-trunks rising amid a copse; or the dark water of a
sea-cave, lapping, translucent and gem-like, round rock ledges; or a
reedy pool, with the chimneys of an old house rising among elms hard
by: in a moment the mood would come upon him, and he would feel that a
door had been opened for his spirit into a place of sweet imaginings,
of wistful peace, bringing to him a hope of something that might
assuredly be, some deep haven of God where the soul might float upon a
golden tide. One day, for instance, two old line-engravings of Italian
pictures which he had inherited, and which hung in his little library,
gave him this sense; he had known them ever since he was a child, and
they had never spoken to him before. Had they hung all these years
patiently waiting for that moment? One was "The Betrothal of the
Virgin," by Raphael, where the old bearded priest in his tiara, with
his robes girt precisely about him, casts an inquiring look on the
pair, as Joseph, a worn, majestic figure, puts the ring on the Virgin's
finger. Some of it was hard and formal enough; the flowers on Joseph's
rod might have been made of china; the slim figure of the disappointed
suitor, breaking his staff, had an unpleasing trimness; and the
companions of the Virgin were models of feeble serenity. But the great
new octagonal temple in the background,--an empty place it seemed--for
the open doors gave a glimpse of shadowy ranges--the shallow steps, the
stone volutes, the low hills behind, with the towered villa--even the
beggars begging of the richly dressed persons on the new-laid
pavement--all these had a sudden appeal for him.
The other picture was the "Communion of Jerome," by Domenichino--a
stiff, conventional design enough. The cherubs hanging in air might
have been made of wax or even metal--there was no aerial quality about
them--they cumbered the place! But the wistful look of the old worn
saint, kneeling so faintly, so wearily, the pure lines of the shrine,
the waxlights, the stiff robes of the priest, the open arch showing an
odd, clustered, castellated house, rising on its steep rocks among dark
brushwood, with a glimmering pool below, and mysterious persons drawing
near--it all had a tyrannical effect on Hugh's mind. Probably a
conventional critic would have spoken approvingly of the Raphael and
disdainfully enough of the Domenichino--but the point to Hugh was not
in the art revealed, but in the association, the remoteness, the
suggestiveness of the pictures. The faults of each were patent to him;
but something in that moment shone through; one looked through a
half-open door, and saw some beautiful mystery being celebrated within,
something that one could not explain or analyse, but which was none the
less certainly there.
Thus art became to Hugh, like nature, an echoing world that lay all
about him, which could suddenly become all alive with constraining
desire and joy. There was a scientific apprehension of both nature and
art possible, no doubt. The very science that lay behind art had a
suggestiveness of its own; that again had its own times for appeal.
But Hugh felt that here again he must realise his limitations, and that
life, to be real, must be a constant resisting of diffuse wanderings in
knowledge and perception. That his own medium was the medium of words,
and that his task was to discern their colour and weight, their
significance, whether alone or in combination; that he must be able to
upraise the jointed fabric of thought, like a framework of slim rods of
firm metal, not meant to be seen or even realised by the reader, but
which, when draped with the rich tapestry of words, would lend shape
and strong coherence to the whole. All other art must simply minister
light and fragrance; it might be studied, indeed, but easily and
superficially; not that it would not be better, perhaps, if he could
have approached other arts with penetrating insight; but he felt that
for himself, with his limitations, his feebleness, his faltering grasp,
nothing must come between him and his literary preoccupation. The
other arts might feed his soul indeed, but he could not serve them. He
found that he took great delight, and was always at ease, in the
company of musicians and painters, because he could understand and
interpret their point of view, their attitude of mind; while on the
other hand he could approach them with the humility, the perceptive
humility, which the artist desires as an atmosphere; he did not know
enough about the technical points to controvert and differ, while he
knew enough to feel inspired by the tense feeling of secrets,
understood and practised, which were yet hidden from ordinary eyes.
Art, then, and music became for Hugh as a sweet and remote illustration
of his own consecration--and indeed there were moments when, wearied by
his own strenuous toil, ploughing sadly through the dreary sands of
labour, that must close at intervals round the feet of the serious
craftsman, the sight of a picture hanging perhaps in a room full of
cheerful company, or the sound of music--a few bars rippling from an
open window, or stealing in faint gusts from the buttressed window of a
church lighted for evensong--came to him like a sacred cup, carried in
the hovering hands of a ministering angel, revealing to him the
delicate hidden joy of beauty of which he had almost lost sight in his
painful hurrying to some appointed end. _Hinc lucem et pocula sacra_,
said the old motto of Cambridge. The light was clear enough, and led
him forward, as it led the pilgrim of old, shining across a very wide
field. But the holy refreshment that was tendered him upon the way,
this was the blessed gift of those other arts which he dared not to
follow, but which he knew held within themselves secrets as dear as the
art which in his loneliness he pursued.
XXXV
Artistic Susceptibility--An Apologia--Temperament--Criticism of
Life--The Tangle
Hugh had found himself one evening in the Combination-room of his
college, in a little group of Dons who were discussing with great
subtlety and ardour the question of retaining Greek in the entrance
examinations of the university. It seemed to Hugh that the arguments
employed must be identical with those that might formerly have been
used to justify the retention of Hebrew in the curriculum--the
advisability of making acquaintance at first hand with a noble
literature, the mental discipline to be obtained; "Greek has such a
noble grammar!" said one of these enthusiasts. Hugh grew a little
nettled at the tone of the discussion. The defenders of Greek seemed
to be so impervious to facts which told against them. They erected
their theories, like umbrellas, over their heads, and experience
pattered harmlessly on the top. Hugh advanced his own case as an
instance of the failure, of the melancholy results of a classical
curriculum. It was deplorable, he said, that he should have realised,
as he did when he left the university, that his real education had then
to begin. He had found himself totally ignorant of modern languages
and modern history, of science, and indeed of all the ideas with which
the modern world was teeming. The chief defender of Greek told him
blithely that he was indulging the utilitarian heresy; that the object
of his education had been to harden and perfect his mind, so as to make
it an instrument capable of subtle appreciation and ardent
self-improvement. When Hugh pleaded the case of immense numbers of
boys who, after they had been similarly perfected and hardened, had
been left, not only ignorant of what they had been supposed to be
acquiring, but without the slightest interest in or appreciation of
intellectual or artistic ideas at all, he was told that, bad as their
case was, it would have been still worse if they had not been subjected
to the refining process. Hugh, contrary to his wont, indulged in a
somewhat vehement tirade against the neglect of the appreciative and
artistic faculties in the case of the victims of a classical education.
He maintained that the theory of mental discipline was a false one
altogether, and that boys ought to be prepared on the one hand for
practical life, and on the other initiated into mental culture. He
compared the mental condition of a robust English boy, his sturdy
disbelief in intellectual things, with the case of a young Athenian,
who was, if we could trust Plato, naturally and spontaneously
interested in thoughts and ideas, sensitive to beautiful impressions,
delicate, subtle, intelligent, and not less bodily active. He went on
to carry the war into the enemy's country, and to attack the theory of
mental discipline altogether, which he maintained was the same thing as
to train agricultural labourers in high-jumping and sprinting, or like
trying to put a razor-edge on a hoe. What he said was neglected
altogether was the cultivation of artistic susceptibility. In nature,
in art, in literature, he maintained, lay an immense possibility of
refined and simple pleasure, which was never cultivated at all. The
mental discipline, he argued, which average boys received, was doubly
futile, because it neither equipped them for practical life, nor opened
to them any vista of intellectual or artistic pleasure. What he
himself desired to do was, on the one hand, to equip boys for practical
life, and on the other to initiate them into the possibilities of
intellectual recreation. The ordinary boy, he thought, was turned out
with a profound disbelief in intellectual things, and a no less
profound belief in games as the only source of rational pleasure. His
own belief was that a great many English boys had the germs of simple
artistic pleasures dormant in their spirits, and that they might be
encouraged to believe in books, in art, in music, as sources of
tranquil enjoyment, instead of regarding them as slightly unwholesome
and affected tastes. He was aware that his views were being regarded
as dangerously heterodox, and as tainted indeed with a kind of
aesthetic languor. He felt that he was appearing to pose as the
champion, not only of an unpopular cause, but of an essentially
effeminate system. His opponents were certainly not effeminate; but
they were masculine only in the sense in which the soldier is
masculine, in his sturdy contempt for the arts of peace; whereas to
Hugh the soldier was only an inevitable excrescence on the community, a
disagreeable necessity which would disappear in the light of a rational
and humane civilisation.
A young Don, a friend of Hugh's, who had taken part in the discussion,
a few days after, in the course of a walk, attacked Hugh on the
subject. Hugh was aware that he defended himself very indifferently at
the time; but some remarks of his friend, who was a brisk and practical
young man with a caustic wit, rankled in Hugh's mind. His friend had
said that the danger of Hugh's scheme was that it tended to produce
people of the Maudle and Postlethwaite type, who made life into a mere
pursuit of artistic impressions and sensations. "The fact is,
Neville," he said, "that you upheld Epicureanism pure and simple; or,
if you dislike the word because of its associations, you taught a mere
Neo-Cyrenaicism. You may say that the kind of pleasure you defended is
a refined and intellectual sort of pleasure, but for all that it tends
to produce men who withdraw from practical life into a mild hedonism;
you would develop a coterie of amiable, secluded persons, fastidious
and delicate, indifferent citizens, individualistic and self-absorbed;
the training of character retires into the background; and the meal
that you press upon us is a meal of exquisite sauces, but without meat.
Fortunately," his friend added, "the necessity of earning a living
keeps most people from drifting into a life of this kind. It is only
consistent with comfortable private means."
These phrases stuck in Hugh's memory with a painful insistence. He
felt as if he had been rolled among thorns. He determined to think the
matter carefully out. Was he himself drifting into a species of
mystical hedonism? It was very far from his purpose to do that. He
determined that he would prepare a little apologia on the subject, to
send to his friend; and this was what he eventually despatched:--