Hugh determined with all his might that he would try to preach this simple gospel; that he would praise and uphold the doctrine of sincerity, of appreciation, of joy. He made up his mind that he would not be drawn into the whirlpool, that he would intermingle long spaces of eager solitude with his life, that he would meditate, reflect, enjoy; that he would try to discern the significance of all things seen or felt, and practise a disposition to approach all phenomena, whether pleasant or painful, in a critical mood; and at the same time he resolved that his criticism should not be a mere solvent; that he would strive to discern not the dulness, the ugliness, the dreariness of life, but its ardours, its passions, its transporting emotions, its beauties. That was a task for a lifetime. Whatever was doubtful, this was certain, that one was set in a mysterious, attractive, complex place; if one regarded it carelessly, it seemed a commonplace affair enough, full of material activities, dull necessities, foolish stirrings, low purposes; but if one looked a little closer, there were strange, dim, beautiful figures moving in and out, evanescent and shadowy, behind the nearer and more distracting elements. Here was hope, with a far-off gaze, beauty with mournful yearning eyes, love with finger on lip and dreamful gaze. It was here that the larger, the holier life lay. What was necessary was to keep apart, with deliberate purpose, from all fruitless vexations, dull anxieties, sordid designs. To detach oneself, not from life, but from the scum and foam of life; to realise that the secret lay in the middle of it all, and that it was to be discerned not by fastidious abstention, not by a chilly asceticism, but by welcoming all nobler impulses, all spiritual influences; not by starving body or mind, but by selecting one's food carefully and temperately. If a man, Hugh thought, could live life in this spirit, reasonable, kindly, humble, sincere, he could encourage others to the same simplicity of aim. To be selfish was to miss the beauty of the whole; for the essence of the situation was to reveal to others, by example and by precept, what they already so dimly knew.

To find out what one could do, where one could help, and to work with all one's might; to live strongly and purely; not to be dissuaded by comment or discouraged by lack of sympathy; to meet others simply and frankly; to be more desirous to ascertain other points of view than to propound one's own; not to be ashamed to speak unaffectedly of one's own admirations and hopes; not to desire recognition; not to yield to personal motives; not to assent to conventional principles blindly, nor to dissent from them mechanically; never to be contemptuous or intolerant; to foresee contingencies and not to be deterred by them; to be open to all impressions; to be tender to all sincere scruples; not to be censorious or hasty; not to anticipate opposition; to be neither timid nor rash; to seek peace; to be gentle rather than conscientious; to be appreciative rather than critical—on these lines Hugh wished to live; he desired no deference, no personal domination; but neither did he wish to reject responsibility if he were consulted and trusted. Above all things he hoped to resist the temptation of taking soundings, of calculating his successes. Fame and renown allured him, none but he could say how much; but he knew in his heart that he contemned their specious claims, and he hoped that they would some day cease to trouble him. He knew that much depended upon health and vigour; but on the other hand he believed that the most transforming power in the world was the desire to be different; why he could not stride into his kingdom and realise his ideal all at once, he could not divine; but meanwhile he would desire the best, and look forward in confidence and hope.



XV

The Pilgrim's Progress—The Pilgrimage—Development—The Eternal Will

Hugh was seized, one bright February morning of clear sun and keen winds, with a sudden weariness of his work. This rebellious impulse did not often visit him, because he loved his work very greatly, and there were no hours so happy as those which were so engaged. But to-day he thought to himself suddenly that, lost thus in his delightful labour, he was forgetting to live. How strange it was that the hours one loved most were the hours of work that sped past unconsciously, when one stood apart, absorbed in dreams, from the current of things. It seemed to him that he was like the Lady of Shalott, so intent upon her web and the weaving of it, that she thought of the moving forms upon the road beyond the river merely as things that could be depicted in her coloured threads. He took up the Pilgrim's Progress and sate a long while reading it, and smiling as he read; he wondered why so many critics spoke so slightingly of the second part, which seemed to him in some ways almost more beautiful than the first. There was not perhaps quite the same imaginativeness or zest; but there was more instinctive art, because the writer was retracing the same path, lodging at the same grave houses, encountering the same terrors, and yet representing everything as mirrored in a different quality of mind; the mind of a faithful woman, and of the boys and maidens who walked with her upon pilgrimage. There was not quite the same romance, perhaps, but there was more tenderness and sweetness. It came less from the mind and more from the heart.

Hugh smiled to see how rapidly the dangers of the road must have diminished, if Mr. Greatheart had often convoyed a party on their way. That mighty man laid about him with such valour, sliced off the heads and arms of giants with such cordial good-humour, that there could hardly, Hugh thought, have been for the next company any adventures left at all. Moreover so many of the stubborn and ill-favoured persons had come by a bad end, were hung in chains by the road, or lying pierced with sorrows, that later pilgrims would have to complain of a lack of bracing incidents. Still, how delicate and gentle a journey it was, and with what caressing fondness the writer helped these young and faltering feet along the way. What pretty and absurd sights they saw! How laden they were with presents! Christiana had Mr. Skill's boxes, twelve in all, of medicine, with no doubt a vial or two of tears of repentance to wash the pills down; she had bottles of wine, parched corn, figs and raisins from the Lord of the place, to say nothing of the golden anchor which the maidens gave her, which must have impeded her movements.

He read with a smile, which was not wholly one of amusement, Mr. Greatheart's admirable argument as to how the process of redemption was executed. The Redeemer, it seemed, had no less than four kinds of righteousness, three to keep, which he could not do without, and one kind to give away. Every detail of the case was supported by a little cluster of marginal texts, and no doubt it appeared as logical and simple to the author as a problem or an equation. But what an extraordinary form of religion it all was! There was not the least misgiving in the mind of the author. The Bible was to him a perfectly unquestioned manifesto of the mind of God, and solved everything and anything. And yet the whole basis of the pilgrimage was insecure. There was no free gift of grace at all. Some few fortunate people were started on pilgrimage by being given an overpowering desire to set out, while the pleasant party who met at Madam Wanton's house, Mr. Lightmind and Mr. Love-the-flesh, with Mr. Lechery and Mrs. Filth, and passed the afternoon with music and dancing, were troubled by no divine misgivings.

Then, too, the Lord of the way found no difficulty in easing the path of the gentler sort of pilgrims. He kept the Valley of the Shadow comparatively quiet for Christiana and her tender band. The ugly thing that came to meet them, and the Lion that padded after them, were not suffered to draw near. The hobgoblins were stayed from howling. It never seemed to have occurred to Bunyan to question why the Lord of the way had ever allowed this unhallowed crew to gather in the valley at all. If he could restrain them, and if Mr. Greatheart could hew the giants in pieces, why could not the whole nest of hornets have been smoked out once and for all? Even the Slough of Despond could not be mended with all the cartloads of promises and texts that were shot there. And yet for all that, when one came to reflect upon it, this Calvinistic scheme of election and reprobation did seem to correspond in a terrible manner with the phenomena of the world. One saw people around one, some of whom seemed to start with an instinct for all that was pure and noble, and again others seemed to begin with no preference for virtue at all, but to be dogged with inherited corruption from the outset. The mistake which moralists made was to treat all alike, as if all men had the moral instinct equally developed; and yet Hugh had met not a few men who were restrained by absolutely no scruples, except prudential ones, and the dread of incurring conventional penalties, from yielding to every bodily impulse. If truth and purity and unselfishness were the divine things, if happiness lay there, why were there such multitudes of people created who had no implanted desire to attain to these virtues?

It was in the grip of such thoughts that Hugh left the house and walked alone through the streets of the town, as Christian might have walked in the City of Destruction. What was one to fly from? and whither was the pilgrimage to tend? The streets were full of busy comfortable people, some, like Mr. Brisk, men of considerable breeding, some again, like the two ill-favoured ones, marked for doom; here and there was a young woman whose name might have been Dull. What was one's duty in the matter? Was one indeed to repent, with groans and cries, for a corruption of heart that had been bestowed upon one without any choice of one's own? Was one bound to overwhelm one's companions with abundance of pious suggestions, to rebuke vice, to rejoice in the disasters that befell the ungodly? It seemed a hopeless business from first to last; of course, if one had Bunyan's simple faith, if one could believe that at a certain moment, on the Hill of Calvary, a thing had been accomplished which had in an instant changed the whole scheme of the world; that a wrathful Creator, possessed hitherto by a fierce and vindictive anger with the frail creatures whom he moulded by thousands from the clay, was in an instant converted into a tender and compassionate father, his thirst for vengeance satisfied, it would be plain enough; but Hugh felt in the depths of his heart that whatever else might be true, that was not; or at least if it had any semblance of truth in it, it simply consummated a mystery so appalling that one must merely resign all hope and courage.

What could one make of a Gospel that could lend any colour to a theory such as this? Was it the fault of the Gospel, or was the error rooted in human nature, a melancholy misinterpretation of a high truth? It seemed to Hugh that the mistake lay there; it seemed to arise from the acceptance by the Puritans of the Bible as all one book, and by the deliberate extrusion of the human element from it. Christ, in the Gospel, seemed to teach, so far as Hugh could understand, not that He had effected any change in the nature or disposition of God, but that He had always been a Father of men, full of infinite compassion and love; the miracle of Christ's life was the showing how a Divine spirit, bound by all the sad limitations of mortality, could yet lead a life of inner peace and joy, a life of perfect trust and simplicity. The clouding of the pure Gospel came from the vehement breath of his interpreters. His later interpreters were men in whose minds was instinctively implanted the old harsh doctrine of man's perverse corruption, and the dark severity of God's justice; and thus the Puritans were misled, because they laid an equal stress upon the whole of the Bible, and spoke of it as all of equal and Divine authority. Instead of rejecting, as faulty human conceptions, what did not harmonise with the purer Gospel light, they sought and found in the Gospel a confirmation of the older human view. They treated the whole collection of books as all equally true, all equally important, and thus they were bent on seeing that the Gospel should fulfil rather than supersede the law. This was in part the spirit of St. Paul; and thus the Puritan Gospel was the Gospel of St. Paul rather than the Gospel of the Saviour. To Hugh the Old Testament was a very wonderful thing, wonderful because it showed the rise of a spirit of personal righteousness in the world, a spirit that worshipped morality with the same vehemence and enthusiasm as that with which the Greeks worshipped beauty. And thus because they had loved righteousness and hated iniquity, there had been given to their imperious nation the reward that the humanity of their race should be chosen to enshrine the Divine Spirit of the Saviour.

Hugh felt that the weakness of the ecclesiastical position was its obstinate refusal to admit the possibilities of future development. A century ago, a man who ventured to hint that the story of Noah's Ark might not be historically and exactly true would have been pronounced a dangerous heretic. Now no one was required to affirm his belief in it. Nowadays the belief in the miraculous element even of the New Testament was undeniably weakening. Yet the orthodox believer still pronounced a Christian unsound who doubted it.

Here lay the insecurity of the orthodox champions. They stumbled on, fully accepting, when they could not help themselves, the progressive developments of thought, yet loudly condemning any one who was a little further ahead upon the road, until they had caught him up.

Still, the old Puritan poet, for all his over-preciseness of definition, all his elaborate scheme of imputed righteousness, all his dreary metaphysic, had yet laid his hand upon the essential truth. Life was indeed a pilgrimage; and as the new law, the law of science, was investigated and explored, it seemed hardly less arbitrary, hardly more loving than the old. It was a scheme of infinite delay; no ardent hopes, no burning conceptions of justice and truth could hasten or retard the working of the inflexible law, which blessed without reference to goodness, and punished without reference to morality. No one could escape by righteousness, no man could plead his innocence or his ignorance. One was surrounded by inexplicable terrors, one's path was set with gins and snares. Here the smoke and the flame burst forth, or the hobgoblins roared in concert; here was a vale of peace, or a house of grave and kindly entertainment; and sometimes from the hill-tops of the land of Beulah, there seemed indeed to be a radiant vision, dim-descried, of towers and pearly gates, a high citadel of heavenly peace. But how little one learned even of one's own strength and weakness! The one instinct, which might itself be a delusion, was that one had a choice in the matter, a will, a power to act or to refrain from acting; there was a deep-seated impulse to fare onward, to hope, to struggle. It was useless to blame the mysterious conditions of the journey, for they were certainly there. The only faith that was possible was the belief that the truth was somehow larger, nobler, more beautiful than one could conceive it to be; and there was a restfulness, when one apprehended what seemed so dark at first, in the knowledge that one's character and environment alike were not one's own choice; the only way was to keep one's eye fixed upon the furthest hope, and never to cease imploring the Power that made us what we were, to give us not abundant, but sufficient, strength, and to guide us into acting, so far as we had power to act, as He willed.

This then became for Hugh his practical religion; to commit himself unceasingly, in joy and trouble alike, in the smallest matters, to the Eternal will; until he grew to feel that if there were anything true in the world, it was the power of that perpetual surrender. It was surprising to him to find how anxiety melted into tranquillity, if one could but do that. Not only, he learnt, must great decisions be laid before God, but the smallest acts of daily life. How often one felt the harassing weight of small duties, the distasteful business, the anxious conversation, the dreary occasion; fatigue, disappointment, care, uncertainty, timidity! If one could but put the matter into the hands of God, instead of rehearsing and calculating and anticipating, what a peace flowed into one's spirit! Difficulties melted away like mist before it. The business was tranquilly accomplished; the interview that one dreaded provided its own obvious solution, vexations were healed, troubles were suddenly revealed as marvellously unimportant. One blundered still, went perversely wrong, yielded falteringly to an impulse knowing it to be evil; but even such events had a wholesome humiliation about them which brought healing with it. The essence of the whole situation was to have in one's heart the romance of pilgrimage, to expect experience, both sweet and bitter, to desire the goal rather than the prize; and to find the jewels of patience, hopefulness, and wisdom by the way, where one had least expected them.



XVI

Humanity—Individuality—The Average

Hugh, one Sunday, in walking alone outside Cambridge, went for some considerable time behind a party of young men and boys, who were out for a stroll. He observed them with a disgustful curiosity. They were over-dressed; they talked loudly and rudely, and, so far as Hugh could hear, both coarsely and unamusingly. They laughed boisterously, they made offensive remarks about humble people who passed them. It was the height of humour to push each other unexpectedly into the ditch at the side of the road, and then their laughter became uproarious. It was harmless enough, but it was all so ugly and insolent, that Hugh thought that he had seldom seen anything which was so singularly and supremely unattractive. The performance seemed to have no merit in it from any point of view. These youths were no doubt exulting in the pride of their strength, but the only thing that they really enjoyed was that the people who met them should be disconcerted and distressed. Making every allowance for thoughtlessness and high spirits, it seemed unnecessary that these qualities should manifest themselves so unpleasingly. Hugh wondered whether, as democracy learned its strength, humanity was indeed becoming more vulgar, more inconsiderate, more odious. Singly, perhaps, these very boys might be sensible and good-humoured people enough, but association seemed only to develop all that was worst in them. And yet they were specimens of humanity at its strongest and cheerfullest. They were the hope of the race—for the same thing was probably going on all over England—and they would no doubt develop into respectable and virtuous citizens; but the spectacle of their joy was one that had no single agreeable feature. These loutish, rowdy, loud-talking, intolerable young men were a blot upon the sweet day, the pleasant countryside. Probably, Hugh thought, there was something sexual beneath it all, and the insolence of the group was in some dim way concerned with the instinct for impressing and captivating the female heart. Perhaps the more demure village maidens who met them felt that there was something dashing and even chivalrous about these young squires.

There came into Hugh's mind the talk of a friend who had been staying with him, a man of lofty socialistic ideals, who spoke much and eloquently of the worship of humanity. Reflecting upon the phrase, Hugh felt that he could attach no sort of meaning to it. What was the humanity that one was to worship? Was it the glory of the average man? was it the memory of the past? was it the possibility of the future? It seemed to Hugh to be an impossible abstraction. He had said as much to his friend, who had replied that it was like the worship of Nature, which Hugh himself practised. But Hugh replied that he did not worship Nature at all. There was much in Nature that he did not understand, much that he feared and disliked. There was an abundance of beautiful things in Nature, beautiful objects, beautiful moments; but it was the beautiful in Nature that he worshipped, not Nature as a whole; there was enough, he said, in Nature that was desirable, to give him a kind of hope that there was some high and beautiful thought behind it; at which his friend became eloquent, veiling, Hugh thought, a great confusion of mind behind a liberal use of rhetoric, and spoke of suffering, toiling, sorrowing, onward-looking humanity, its impassioned relations, its great wistful heart. Hugh again, could not understand him; he thought that his friend had formed some exotic and fanciful conception, arrived at by subtracting from humanity all that was not pathetic and solemn and dignified, and then fusing the residue into a sort of corporeal entity. He did not see any truth or reality about the conception. It seemed to him as unreal as though one had personified the Great Western Railway into a sort of gigantic form, striding westward, covered with packages of merchandise, and carrying a typical human being, as St. Christopher carried the sacred child across the flood. It was pure Anthropomorphism.

Hugh could understand a personal relation, even the passionate idealisation of an individual. He could conceive of the latter as giving one a higher idea of the possibilities of the human race: but to lump a vast and complex system together, to concentrate unknown races, dead and living, negroes, Chinamen, Homeric heroes and palaeolithic men, into one definite conception, and to worship it, seemed to Hugh an almost grotesque thought. He could conceive of a species of Pantheism, in which the object of one's awe and worship was the vast force underlying all existing things; but even so it seemed necessary to Hugh to focus it all into one personal force. The essence of worship seemed to Hugh to be that the thing worshipped should have unity and individuality. It seemed to him as impossible to worship a thing of which he himself was a part, as to demand that a cat should adore the principle of felinity.

The essence of the world, of life, to Hugh lay in the sense of his own individuality. He was instinctively conscious of his own existence, he was experimentally conscious of the existence of a complicated world outside of him. But it was to him rather a depressing than an ennobling thought, that he was one of a class, fettered by the same disabilities, the same weaknesses, as millions of similar objects. Perhaps it was a wholesome humiliation, but it was none the less humiliating. On the one hand he was conscious of the vast power of imagination, the power of standing, as it were, side by side with God upon the rampart of heaven, and surveying the whole scheme of created things. Yet on the other hand there fell the sense of a baffling and miserable impotence, a despairing knowledge that one's consciousness of the right to live, and to live happily, was conditioned by one's utter frailty, the sense that one was surrounded by a thousand dangers, any one of which might at any moment deprive one of the only thing of which one was sure. How, and by what subtle process of faith and imagination, could the two thoughts be reconciled?

The best that Hugh could make of the ardent love of life and joy which inspired him, was the belief that it was implanted in man, that he might have, for some inscrutable reason, a motive for experiencing, and for desiring to continue to experience, the strange discipline of the world. If men did not love life and ease so intensely, at the first discouragement, at the first touch of pain, they would languidly and despairingly cease to be. Hugh seemed to discern that men were put into the world that they might apprehend something that it was worth their while to apprehend; that for some reason which he had no means of divining, life could not be a wholly easy or pleasurable thing; but that in order to inspire men to bear pain and unhappiness, they were permeated with an intense desire to continue to live, and to regain some measure of contentment, if that contentment were for a time forfeited. Of course there were many things which that did not explain, but it was a working theory that seemed to contain a large element of truth. Sometimes a technically religious person would say that the world was created for the glory of God, a phrase which filled Hugh with a sense of bewildered disgust. It either implied that God demanded recognition, or that it was all done in a species of intolerable pride of heart, as a mere exhibition of power. That God should yield to a desire for display seemed to Hugh entirely inconsistent with a belief in His awful supremacy.

It seemed to him rather that God must have abundant cause to be dissatisfied with the world as it was, but that at the same time He must have some overpoweringly just reason for acquiescing for a time in its imperfection. How else could one pray, or aspire, or hope at all?

But the sight of human beings, such as Hugh had before his eyes that day, filled him with perplexity. One was only possessed by an intense desire that they might be different from what they were. Hugh indeed knew that he himself had sore need to be different from what he was. But the qualities that lay behind the motions and speech of these lads—inconsiderateness, indifference to others, vanity, grossness—were the things that he had always been endeavouring to suppress and eradicate in himself; they were the things that were detested by poets, saints, and all chivalrous and generous souls.

Sometimes indeed one was confronted, in the world of men, by a perfectly sincere, noble, quiet, gentle, loving personality; and then one perceived, as in a gracious portrait, what humanity could hope to aspire to. But on the other hand Hugh had seen, in the pages of a periodical, an attempt to arrive at a typical human face, by photographing a number of individuals upon the same plate; and what a blurred, dim, uncomfortable personality seemed to peer forth! To worship humanity seemed to Hugh like trying to worship this concentrated average; and he had little hope that, if an absolutely average man were constructed, every single living individual contributing his characteristics to the result, the result would be edifying, encouraging, or inspiring. Hugh feared that the type would but sink the most tolerant philosopher in a sense of irreclaimable depression. And yet if, guided by prejudice and preference, one made up a figure that one could wholly admire, how untrue to nature it would be, how different from the figure that other human beings would consent to admire!

The problem was insoluble; the only way was to set one's self courageously at one's own little corner of the gigantic scheme, to attack it as faithfully as one could, by humble aspirations, quiet ministries, and tender-hearted sympathy; to take as simply as possible whatever message of beauty and hope fell to one's share; not to be absorbed in one's own dreams and imaginings, but to interpret faithfully every syllabic of the great Gospel; and, above all, to remember that work was inevitable, necessary, and even beautiful; but that it only had the noble quality, when it was undertaken for the love of others, and not for love of oneself.



XVII

Spring—Wonder

The return of the sweet spring days, with the balmy breath of warm winds, soft sunshine on the pastures, the songs of contented birds in thicket and holt, brought to Hugh an astonishing richness of sensation, a waft of joy that was yet not light-hearted, joy that was on the one hand touched with a fine rapture, yet on the other hand overshadowed by a wistful melancholy. The frame, braced by wintry cold, revelled in the outburst of warmth, of light, of life; and yet the very luxuriousness of the sensation brought with it a languor and a weariness that was akin rather to death than life. He rode alone far into the shining countryside, and found, in the middle of wide fields with softly swelling outlines, where the dry ploughlands were dappled with faint fawn-coloured tints, a little wood, in the centre of which was a reed-fringed pool. The new rushes were beginning to fringe the edges of the tiny lake, but the winter sedge stood pale and sere, and filled the air with a dry rustling. The water was as clear as a translucent gem, and Hugh saw that life was at work on the floor of the pool, sending up rich tresses of green-haired water-weed. The copse was green under foot, full of fresh, uncrumpling leaves. He sat down beside the pool; the silence of the wide fields was broken only by the faint rustling of sedge and tree, and the piping of a bird, hid in some darkling bush hard by. Never had Hugh been more conscious of the genial outburst of life all about him, yet never more aware of his isolation from it all. His body seemed to belong to it all, swayed and governed by the same laws that prompted their gentle motions to tree and herb; but his soul seemed to him to-day like a bright creature caught in the meshes of a net, beating its wings in vain against the constraining threads. From what other free and spacious country was it exiled? What other place did it turn to with desire and love? It seemed to him to-day that he was a captive in a strange land, remembering some distant home, some heavenly Zion, even in his mirth. It seemed to him as if the memory of some gracious place dwelt in his mind, separated only from his earthly memory by a thin yet impenetrable veil. His spirit held out listless hands of entreaty to some unseen power, desiring he knew not what. To-day on earth the desire of all created things seemed to be directed to each other. The tiny creeping sprays of delicate plants that carpeted the wood seemed to interlace with one another in tender embraces. In loneliness they had slept beneath the dark ground, and now that they had risen to the light, they seemed to thrill with joy to find themselves alone no longer. He saw in the leafless branches of a tree near him two doves, with white rings upon their necks, that turned to each other with looks of desire and love. Was it for some kindred spirit, for the sweet consent of some desirous heart that Hugh hankered? No! it was not that! It was rather for some unimagined freedom, some perfect tranquillity that he yearned. It was like the desire of the stranded boat for the motion and dip of the blue sea-billows. He would have hoisted the sail of his thought, have left the world behind, steering out across the hissing, leaping seas, till he should see at last the shadowy summits, the green coves of some remote land, draw near across the azure sea-line. To-day the fretful and poisonous ambitions of the world seemed alien and intolerable to him. As the dweller in wide fields sees the smoke of the distant town rise in a shadowy arc upon the horizon, and thinks with pity of the toilers there in the hot streets, so Hugh thought of the intricate movement of life as of a thing that was both remote and insupportable. That world where one jostled and strove, where one made so many unwilling mistakes, where one laboured so unprofitably, was it not, after all, an ugly place? What seemed so strange to him was that one should be set so unerringly in the middle of it, while at the same time one was given the sense of its unreality, its distastefulness. So marvellously was one made that one sickened at its contact, and yet, if one separated oneself from it, one drooped and languished in a morbid gloom. The burden of the flesh! The frailty of the spirit! The two things seemed irreconcilable, and yet one endured them both. The world so full of beauty and joy, and yet the one gift withheld that would make one content.

And yet it was undeniable that the very sadness that he felt had a sweet fragrance about it. It was not the sadness of despair, but of hope unfulfilled. The soul clasped hands with the unknown, with tears of joy, and leaned out of the world as from a casement, on perilous seas. Indeed the very wealth of loveliness on every hand, and the mysterious yearning to take hold of it, to make it one's own, to draw it into the spirit, the hope that seemed at once so possible and yet so baffling, gave the key of the mystery. There was a beauty, there was a truth that was waiting for one, and the sweetness here was a type of the unseen. It was only the narrow soul that grudged if it was not satisfied. The brave heart went quietly and simply about its task, welcoming every delicate sight, every whisper of soft airs, every touch of loving hands, every glance of gentle eyes, rejoicing in the mystery of it all; thanking the Lord of life for the speechless wonder of it, and even daring to thank Him that the end was not yet; and that the bird must still speed onwards to the home of its heart, dipping its feet in the crest of the wandering wave, till the land, whither it was bound, should rise like a soft shadow over the horizon; till the shadow became a shape, and at last the tall cliffs, with the green downs above, the glittering plain, the sombre forest, loomed out above one, just beyond where the waves whitened on the loud sea-beaches, and the sound of the breakers came harmoniously over the waste of waters, like the soft tolling of a muffled bell.



XVIII

His Father's Death—Illness—A New Home—The New Light

Up to this time it may be said that Hugh had never felt the pressure of sordid anxieties, or experienced any sorrows but the sorrows of pure emotion. But now all at once there fell on him a series of heavy afflictions. His father died after a very short illness; so little had a fatal result been expected, that Hugh only reached home after his death. It happened that the last sight he had had of his father had been one of peculiar brightness. He had been staying at home, and, on the morning of his return to Cambridge, had gone into the study for a parting talk. He had found his father in a mood, not common with him, but which was growing commoner as he grew older, of serene cheerfulness. He had talked to Hugh very eagerly about a little book of poems that Hugh had lately published. Hugh had hardly mentioned it to his father beforehand, but he had dedicated the book to him, though he imagined that his father must consider poetry a dilettante kind of occupation. He was amazed to find, when he discussed the book with his father, that he was met with so vivid and personal a sympathy, that he discerned that the writing of poetry must have been a preoccupation of his father's in early days, one of those delicate ambitions on which he had sharply turned the key. His mother and sister were away for the day, so that when it was time to go, and the carriage was announced, there was no one but his father in the house. He had, as his custom was, laid his hand on his son's head, and blessed him with a deep emotion, adding a few words of love and confidence that had filled Hugh's eyes with tears; and his father had then put his arm through his son's, walked to the door with him, and had stood there in the bright morning, with his grey hair stirred by the wind, waving his hand till the carriage had turned the corner of the shrubbery.

Hugh often suffered from a certain apprehensiveness of mind on leaving home; he had sometimes wondered, as he said farewell to the group, whether he would see them thus again. But that morning it had never occurred to him that there was any such possibility in store for him; so that now, when he returned to the darkened house, and presently saw that pale, still form, with a quiet smile on the face, as of one satisfied beyond his dearest wish, he plunged into a depth of ineffectual sorrow such as he had never known before. The one thought that sustained him was that he and his father had loved, understood, and trusted each other. It was a horror to Hugh to think what his feelings might have been in the old days, if his father had died when his own predominant emotion had been a respectful fear of him.

It seemed impossible to believe that all the activities of that long life were over; and as Hugh went through his father's papers, with incessant little heart-broken griefs at the arrangements and precisions that had stood for so much devoted faithfulness and loyal responsibility, it seemed to him as though the door must open, and the well-known figure, with the smile that Hugh knew so well, stand before him.

The first disaster that was revealed to him was the smallness of his father's fortune; his father, though often talking about business to his son, had a curious reticence about money affairs, and had never prepared him for the scantiness of the provision that he had accumulated. Hugh saw at once that the utmost care would have for the future to be exercised, and that their whole scale of life must be altered. The fact was that his father's professional income had been ample, and that he had had a strong dislike to saving money from ecclesiastical sources. The home must evidently be broken up at once, and a small house taken for his mother. But fortunately both his mother and sister were entirely undismayed by this; their tastes were simple enough; but Hugh saw that he would have himself to contribute to their assistance. With his own small fortune, his literary work, and a little academical work that he was doing, he had been able to live comfortably enough without taking thought; but now he saw that all this must be curtailed. He had an intense dislike of thinking about money; and he therefore determined that there should be no small economies on his part, but that he would simply, if necessary, alter his easy scale of living.

It was a terrible process disestablishing the old home; the sale of furniture and books, the displacing of the old pictures, seemed to tear and rend all sorts of delicate fibres; but at last the house was dismantled, and it became a bitter sort of joy to leave a place that had become like a sad skeleton of one that he had loved. The trees, the flowers, the church-tower over the elms—as they drove away on that last morning, these seemed to regard him with mournful and hollow eyes; the parting was indeed so intensely sad, that Hugh experienced a grim relief in completing it; and there fell on him a deep dreariness of spirit, which seemed at last to benumb him, until he felt that he could no longer care for anything.

He returned at last to Cambridge; and now illness fell upon him for the second time in his life. Not a definite illness, but a lingering malaise, which seemed to bereave him of all spring and energy. He was told that he must not work, must spend his time in the open air, must be careful in matters of food and sleep. He lived indeed for some months the life of an invalid. The restrictions fretted him intolerably; but he found that every carelessness brought its swift revenge. He had previously felt little or no sympathy with invalids; he had disliked the signs of illness in others, the languor, the sunken eye, the fretfulness of fever, and now he had to bear them himself. He had always felt, half unconsciously, that illness was a fanciful thing, and might be avoided by a kind of cheerful effort. But now he had to go through the experience of feebleness and peevish inactivity. He used sometimes, out of pure irritability, to resume his work; but he had no grip or vigour; his conceptions were languid, his technical resources were dulled; and then came strange and unmanning dizzinesses, the horrible feeling, in the middle of a cheerful company, that one is hardly accountable for one's actions, when the only escape seems to be to hold on with all one's might to the slenderest thread of conventional thought. The difficulty was to know how to fill the time. There was no relish in company, and yet a hatred of solitude; he used to moon about, sit in the garden, take irresolute walks; he read novels, and found them unutterably dreary. Music was the only thing that lifted him out of his causeless depression, and gave back a little zest to life; but the fear that was almost intolerable was the possibility that he would never emerge out of this wretchedness. Day after day passed, and no change was apparent; till just when he was on the verge of despair, when the darkest visions began to haunt his mind, the cloud began to lift. He found that he could work a little, though the smallest excess was still punished by days of feebleness. But, holding to this thread of hope, Hugh climbed slowly out of the darkness; and it was a day to him of deep and abiding gratitude when, after a long Swiss holiday, in which his bodily activity had come back to him with an intensity of pleasure, Hugh realised that he was again in his ordinary health.

But he had at this time a bitter disappointment. Just before his father's death he had finished preparing a little work for publication, a set of essays on a variety of subjects, to which he had devoted much care and thought. To his deep vexation it met with a very contemptuous reception. Its errors were mercilessly criticised, and it was proclaimed to be the work of a sickly, sentimental dilettante. Hugh found it hard to believe in the verdict; but his conviction was established by the opinion of one of his old friends who, as kindly as possible, pointed out that the book was both thin and egotistical. Hugh felt as if he could never write again, and as if the chief occupation of his life would be gone; but with renewed health his confidence returned, and in a few weeks he was able to look the situation in the face. The reception of the book had brought home to him the direction in which he was drifting. He saw that a certain toughness and hardness of fibre had been wanting. He saw that he had tried to fill a book up out of his own mind, in a leisurely and trifling mood. He had not attempted to grasp his subjects, but had allowed himself to put down loose and half-hearted impressions, instead of trying to see into the essence of the things he was describing.

But, his illness over, he was astonished to find how little both money anxieties and the shattering of literary hopes distressed him. For the first, it was clear that his mother and sister could live with an adequate degree of comfort and dignity. And as for his literary hopes, he realised that the failure had been a real revelation of his own weakness; but he realised too that other people would forget about the book still faster than he himself, and that no previous failures would damn a further work, if only it possessed the true qualities of art; and indeed from this time he dated a real increase of artistic faculty, a sense of constraining vocation, a joy in literary labour, which soon, like a sunrise, brightened all his horizon; and it was pleasant too, though Hugh did not overvalue it, to find his work beginning to bring him a definite, though slight reputation, and a position among imaginative critics.

Moreover his new home began to have a very potent charm for him. His mother had settled in a small ancient house in the depths of the country. They had very few neighbours. The little building itself was full of charm, the charm of mellow beauty and old human ownership; it was embosomed among trees, and had a small walled garden, rich in flowers and shade. He had been there but a few weeks, when he realised that the old feeling of a vague friendliness and intimate concern with nature had come back. It was as though the spirits, which had peopled the remembered flowers and trees of his first home, had flitted with them, and had taken up their abode in this other garden. The flowers seemed to smile at him with the same shy mystery, the trees to surround the house like a troop of loyal sentinels. The absence of the constant social interruptions that had been characteristic of the Rectory was an added charm; his mother and sister, too, though heavily overshadowed by grief, found the place peaceful and congenial; and the best joy of all was the sweet and fragrant relation that sprung up among the three. They were like the survivors of a wreck, whose former familiarity had been converted suddenly into a deep and emotional loyalty, by the sad experiences through which they had passed together. The relations had before been affectionate, but in some ways superficial. Hugh to his surprise found himself daily making discoveries about his mother and sister, through the close relationship into which they were brought. Unsuspected tastes and feelings revealed themselves, and he began to be aware of a whole host of new interests that sprang up between them. Sometimes, when a hedgerow is rooted up, one may notice how a whole crop of unknown flowers, whose seeds had been buried deep in the soil, suddenly emerge to conceal the bare scarred ditch. Hugh thought to himself that the experiences through which they had passed had had this effect of enlarging and extending sympathies which were there all the time, and which had never had an opportunity of revealing themselves. And thus, out of sorrow and wretchedness, there sprang to light a whole range of new forces, a vision of new possibilities. It seemed to Hugh that he was like a man who had passed by night through an unfamiliar country, by unknown roads; that as the darkness had begun to glimmer to dawn, the shapeless shadows of things about him had gradually taken shape, and revealed themselves at last to be but the quiet trees with their gentle tapestry of leaves, leaning over his way; and what had been but a formless horror, became revealed as a company of friendly living things that beckoned comfortably to his spirit, and grew into purer colour as the dawn began to break from underground.



XIX

Women—The Feminine View—Society—Frank Relations—Coldness—Sensitiveness

Hugh had always felt that he had very little comprehension of the feminine temperament; he realised to the full how much more generous, unselfish, high-minded, and sympathetic women were than men, their perceptions of personalities more subtle, their intuitions more delicate; in a difficult matter, a crisis involving the relations of people, when it was hard to know how to act, and when, in dealing with the situation, tact and judgment were required, he found it a good rule to consult a woman about what had happened, and a man about what would happen. Women had as a rule a finer instinct about characters and motives, but their advice about how to act was generally too vehement and rash; a woman could often divine the complexities of a situation better, a man could advise one better how to proceed. But what he could seldom follow was the intellectual processes of women; they intermingled too much of emotion with their logic; they made birdlike, darting movements from point to point, instead of following the track; they tended to be partisans. They forgave nothing in those they disliked; they condoned anything in those they loved. Hugh lived so much himself in the intellectual region, and desired so constantly a certain equable and direct quality in his relations with others, that he seldom felt at ease in his relations with women, except with those who could give him the sort of sisterly camaraderie that he desired. Women seemed to him to have, as a rule, a curious desire for influence, for personal power; they translated everything into personal values; they desired to dominate situations, to have their own way in superficial matters, to have secret understandings. They acted, he thought, as a rule, from personal and emotional motives; and thus Hugh, who above all things desired to live by instinct rather than by impulse, found himself fretted and entangled in a fine network of shadowy loyalties, exacting chivalries, subtle diplomacies, delicate jealousies, unaccountable irritabilities, if he endeavoured to form a friendship with a woman. A normal man took a friendship just as it came, exacted neither attendance nor communication, welcomed opportunities of intercourse, but did not scheme for them, was not hurt by apparent neglect, demanded no effusiveness, and disliked sentiment. Hugh, as he grew older, did not desire very close relationships with people; he valued frankness above intimacy, and candour above sympathy. He found as a rule that women gave too much sympathy, and the result was that he felt himself encouraged to be egotistical. He used to think that when he spoke frankly to women, they tended to express admiration for the way he had acted or thought; and if he met that by saying that he neither deserved or wanted praise, he received further admiration for disinterestedness, when all that he desired was to take the matter out of the region of credit altogether. He believed indeed that women valued the pleasure of making an impression, of exercising influence, too highly, and that in this point their perception seemed to fail; they did not understand that a man acts very often from impersonal motives, and is interested in the doing of the thing itself, whatever it may happen to be, rather than in the effect that his action may have upon other people. It was part of the high-mindedness of women that they could not understand that a man should be so absorbed in the practical execution of a matter. They looked upon men's ambitions, their desire to do or make something—a book, a picture, a poem—as a sort of game in which they could not believe that any one could be seriously interested. Hugh indeed seemed to divine the curious fact that, generally speaking, men and women looked upon the preoccupations and employments of the opposite sex as rather childish; a man would be immersed in practical activities, in business, in organisation, in education, in communicating definite knowledge, in writing books, in attending meetings—this he thought to be the serious and real business of the world; and he was inclined to look upon relationships with other people, sentiment, tender affections, wistful thoughts of others, as a sort of fireside amusement and recreation.

Women, on the other hand, found their real life in these things, desired to please, to win and retain affection, to admire and to be admired, to love and be loved; and they tended to look upon material things—comfort, wealth, business, work, art—as essentially secondary things, which had of course a certain value, but which were not to be weighed in the scale with emotional things. There were naturally many exceptions to this; there were hard, business-like, practical women; there were emotional, tender-hearted, sensitive men; but the general principle held good. And thus it was that men and women regarded the supreme emotion of love from such different points of view, and failed so often to comprehend the way in which the opposite sex regarded it; to women it was but the natural climax, the raising and heightening of their habitual mood into one great momentous passion; it was the flower of life slowly matured into bloom; to men it was more a surprising and tremendous experience, an amazing episode, cutting across life and interrupting its habitual current, contradicting rather than confirming their previous experience.

Hugh was himself rather on the feminine side: though he had a strong practical turn, and could carry through a matter effectively enough, yet he valued delicate and sincere emotions, disinterestedness, simplicity, and loyalty, above practical activity and organisation; the result of this, he supposed, was that he tended, from a sense of the refreshment of contrast, to make his friends rather among men than among women, and this was, he believed, the reason why he had never fallen frankly in love, because he could to a great extent supply out of his own nature the elements which as a rule men sought among women; and because the complexity and sensitiveness of his own temperament took refuge rather in tranquillity and straight-forward commonsense. As he grew older, as he became absorbed more and more in literary work, he tended, he thought, to draw more and more away from human relationships; the energy, the interest, that had formerly gone into making new relationships now began to run in a narrower channel. Whether it was prudent to yield to this impulse he did not stop to inquire. It seemed to him that many of his friends wasted a great deal of force and activity from semi-prudential motives. As his life became more solitary, an old friend once took him to task on this point. He said that it was all very well for a time, but that Hugh would find his interest in his work flag, and that there would be nothing to fill the gap. He advised him, at the cost of some inconvenience, to cultivate relations with a wider circle, to go to social gatherings, to make acquaintances. He knew, he said, that Hugh would possibly find it rather tiresome, but it was of the nature of an investment which might some day prove of value.

Hugh replied that he thought that this was living life too much on the principle of the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass. The White Knight kept a mouse-trap slung to his saddle; when it was objected that he would not be likely to find mice on the back of his horse, he replied that perhaps it was not likely, but that if they were there, he did not choose to have them running about. Hugh confessed that he did find ordinary society tiresome; but to persist in frequenting it, on the chance that some day it would turn out to be a method of filling up vacant hours, seemed to him to be providing against an unlikely contingency, and indeed an ugly and commercial business. He did not think it probable that he would lose interest in his work, and he thought it better to devote himself to it while it interested him. If the time ever came when he needed a new set of relationships, he thought he could trust himself to form them; and if he did not desire to form them, well, to be bored was bad enough, but it was better on the whole to be passively rather than to be actively bored.

But Hugh's theory in reality went deeper than that. He had a strong belief, which grew in intensity with age, that the only chance of realising one's true life was to do something that interested one with all one's might. He did not believe that what was done purely from a sense of duty, unless it pleased and satisfied some part of one's nature, was ever effective or even useful. It was not well done, and it was neglected on any excuse. His pilgrimage through the world presented itself to Hugh in the light of a journey through hilly country. The ridge that rose in front of one concealed a definite type of scenery; that scenery was there; there were indeed a hundred possibilities about it, and the imagination might amuse itself by forecasting what it was to be like. But it seemed to Hugh that one wasted time in these forecasts; and that it was better to wait and see what it actually was, and then to enjoy it as vigorously as one could. To spend one's time in fantastic speculation as to what was coming, was to waste vigour and thought, which were better employed in observing and interpreting what was around one.

And so Hugh resolved that his relations with others should be of this kind; that he would not seek restlessly for particular kinds of friendships; but that he would accept the circle that he found, the persons with whom relations were inevitable; and that he would make the most of what he found. Choice and selection! How little one really employed them! the world streamed past one, an unsuspected, unlooked-for friend would suddenly emerge from the throng, and one would find oneself journeying shoulder to shoulder for a space. Hugh thought indeed sometimes that one made no friendships at all of oneself; but that God sent the influences of which one had need, at the very time at which one needed them, and then silently and tenderly withdrew them again for a time, when they had done their work for the soul. One received much, and perhaps, however unconsciously, however lightly, one gave something of one's own as well.

But all Hugh's relations with others were overshadowed by the great doubt, which was perhaps the heaviest burden he had to carry, as to whether one's individuality endured. The thought that it might not survive death, made him shrink back from establishing a closeness of emotional dependence on another, the loss of which would be intolerable. The natural flame of the heart seemed quenched and baffled by that cold thought. It was the same instinct that made him, as a boy, refuse the gift of a dog, when a pet collie, that had been his own, had been killed by an accident. The pain of the loss had seemed so acute, so irreparable, that he preferred to live uncomforted rather than face such another parting; and there seemed, too, a kind of treachery in replacing love. If, on the other hand, individuality did endure, the best of all relationships seemed to Hugh a frank and sincere companionship, such as may arise between two wayfarers whose road lies together for a little, and who talk easily and familiarly as they walk in the clear light of the dawn. Hugh felt that there was an abundance of fellow-pilgrims, men and women alike, to consort with, to admire, to love; this affability and accessibility made it always easy for Hugh to enter into close relationship with others. He had little desire to guard his heart; and the sacred intimacy, the sharing of secret thoughts and hopes, which men as a rule give but to a few, Hugh was perhaps too ready to give to all. What he lost in depth and intensity he perhaps gained in breadth. But he also became aware that he had a certain coldness of temperament. Many were dear to him, but none essential. There was no jealousy about his relations with others. He never demanded of a friend that he should give him a special or peculiar regard. His frankness was indeed sometimes misunderstood, and people occasionally supposed that they had evoked a nearness of feeling, an impassioned quality, which was not really there. "You give away your heart in handfuls," said a friend to him once in a paroxysm of anger, fancying himself neglected; and Hugh felt that it was both just and unjust. He had never, he thought, given his heart away at all, except as a boy to his chosen friend. But he gave a smiling and tender affection very easily to all who seemed to desire it. He knew indeed from that first experience something of the sweet mystery of faithful devotion; but now he could only idealise, he could not idolise. The world was full of friendly, gracious, interesting people. Circumstance spun one to and fro among the groups and companies; how could one give a unique regard, when there were so many that claimed allegiance and admiration? He saw others flit from passion to passion, from friendship to friendship—Hugh's aim was rather to be the same, to be loyal and true, to be able to take up a suspended friendship where he had laid it down; the most shameful thing in the world seemed to him the ebbing away of vitality out of a relationship; and therefore he would not give pledges which he might be unable to redeem. If the conscious soul survived mortal death, then perhaps these limitations of time and space, which suspended friendships, would exist no longer, and he could wait for that with a quiet hopefulness. But if it all passed away, and was as though it had never been, if life was but a leaping flame, a ripple on the stream, then how could one have the heart to tie indissoluble links?

Hugh half understood that the weakness of his case was that he could argue about it at all. Others went blindly and ardently into loves and friendships, because an irresistible impulse carried them away—with Hugh the impulse was not irresistible. Meanwhile he would give what he could, offer rather than claim; he would reject no proffer of friendship, but he would not, or perhaps he could not, fetter himself with the heavy chains of emotion. But even so he was aware that this temperance, this balance of nature, was not a wholly beautiful or desirable thing.

The perception of this came home to Hugh with peculiar force on a bright fresh day of early spring, when he walked with a friend in the broad green fields beside the Cam. They had been strolling first in the college gardens, where the snowdrops were pushing up, some of them bearing on their heads the crust of earth that had sheltered them; crocuses rose in the borders, like little bursts of flame. A thrush was singing on a high bough, and seemed to be telling, in an eager mystery, the very hopes and dreams of Hugh's heart. He said something that implied as much to his friend, who replied that he did not understand that.

This friend of Hugh's was much younger than himself, a fastidious and somewhat secluded nature, but possessing for Hugh the deep attraction of a peculiar type of character. He had great critical and literary gifts, and seemed to Hugh to bring to the judgment of artistic work an extraordinarily clear and fine criterion of values. But beside this, he seemed to Hugh to have the power of entering into a very close and emotional relationship with people; and out in the meadows where the sun shone bright, the breeze blew soft, and the first daisies showed their heads among the grass, Hugh asked him to explain what he felt about his relationship with others. His friend said that it came to this, that it was the only real and vital thing in the world; and when Hugh pressed him further, and asked him what he felt about the artistic life, his friend said that it was a great mystery, because art also seemed to him a strong, entrancing, fascinating thing; but that it ran counter to and cut across his relations with others, and seemed almost like a violent and distracting temptation, that tore him away from the more vital impulse. He added that the problem as to whether individuality endured (of which they had spoken earlier) seemed to him not to affect the question at all, any more than it affected one's sleep or appetite. At this, for a moment, a mist seemed to roll away from Hugh's eyes, though he knew that it would close in again, and for an instant he understood; to himself relations with others were but one class of beautiful experiences, like art, and music, and nature, and hints of the unseen; not differing in quality, but only in kind, from other experiences. Hugh saw too, in the same flash of insight, that what kept him from emotional relationships was a certain timidity—a dislike of anything painful or disturbing; and that the mistake he made, if that can be called a mistake which was so purely instinctive, was his desire to obliterate and annihilate all the unpleasing, painful, and disagreeable elements from all circumstances and situations. The reason why Hugh did not hunger and thirst after friendship was, he saw, that inconveniences, humours, misunderstandings, mannerisms, entourage, were all so many disagreeable incidents which interfered with his tranquillity of enjoyment. If he had really loved, these things would have weighed as nothing in comparison with the need of satisfying the desire of relationship; as it was, they weighed so much with Hugh that they overpowered the other instinct. It was really a sort of luxuriousness of temperament that intervened; and Hugh felt that for a man to say that he loved his friends, and yet to allow this fastidious sense of discomfort to prevent his seeing them, was as if a man said that he was devoted to music, and yet allowed the tumult of concert-rooms to prevent his ever going to hear music. And yet the language of friendship was so familiar, and the power of multiplying relations with others was so facile a thing with Hugh, that he saw that his failure in the matter was a deplorable and a miserable thing. He was singularly and even richly equipped for the pursuit of friendship; while his very sensitiveness, his inherent epicureanism, which made advance so easy, made progress impossible.

And yet he realised that it was useless to deplore this; that no amount of desire for the larger and deeper experience would make him capable of sustaining its pains and penalties. He saw that he was condemned to pass through life, a smiling and courteous spectator of beauty and delight; but that, through a real and vital deficiency of soul, he could have no share in the inner and holier mysteries.



XX

Limitations—Sympathy—A Quiet Choice—The Mind of God—Intuition

Hitherto it had seemed to Hugh that life was a struggle to escape from himself, from that haunting personality which, like a shadow, dogged and imitated his movements, but all with a sombre blackness, a species of business-like sadness of gesture, doing heavily and mechanically what he himself did with such blitheness and joy. Again and again that self seemed to thwart, to hinder, to check him. There were days, it seemed to him, when a conflict was waged, an unequal conflict, between that outer and that inner self. Days when the inner spirit was intense, alert, eager, and when the outer self was languid, dreary, mockingly sedate and indolent. Again there were days, and these were the saddest of all, when the inner spirit seemed to Hugh to be tranquil, high-minded, and strong; when that outer self was malign, turbulent, and headstrong, and when all the resolution and vigour he possessed, appeared to be wasted, not in following the higher aims and imaginings with a patient purpose, but in curbing and reining the rough and coltish nature that seemed so sadly yoked with his own. He felt on those days like a wearied and fretful charioteer, driving through a scene of rich and moving beauty, on which he would fain feast his eyes and heart, but compelled to an incessant watchfulness, a despairing strain, in watching and guiding his refractory, his spiteful steeds. The control he had never forfeited wholly. Perhaps his sensitiveness, his solitariness, his fastidiousness, had tended to keep his sensuous nature within bounds.

But he went through strange moods, when he could almost wish that he had not been so cautious, so prudent; he felt that he had travelled through life as a spectator merely; and the element of passionate feeling, of confessed devotion, of uncalculating love, had passed him by. He used, in these moods, to wish that he had some soul-stirring experience to look back upon, some passionate affection, some overpowering emotion, which might have constrained him to open and unashamed utterance. How had he missed, he used to ask himself, the experience of a deep and whole-hearted love? There was nothing easier in the world than to establish a certain intimacy of relation. He had, he was aware, a friendly air and a certain simple charm of manner, which made it an easy thing for him to say what was in his mind. A single interview was often enough for him to make a friendship. He had an acute superficial sensibility, which made it very easy for him to divine another's tastes and emotions; and his own emotional experiences, his freedom of expression, gave him the power of interpreting and entering into the feelings of others. But his experience was always the same. He could clasp hands with another soul, he could step pleasantly and congenially through the ante-rooms and corridors of friendship; but as soon as the great door that led to the inner rooms of the house came in sight, a certain coldness, a shamefacedness held him back; the hand was dropped, the expected word unspoken.

Thus Hugh found himself with a great number of close friends, and without a single intimate one. He had never bared his heart to another, he had never seen another heart bare before his eyes. He had never let himself go. Thus he was a master, so to speak, of the emotional elements up to a certain point; but he had never made a surrender of himself, and had always with a certain coldness checked any signs of a surrender in others. A close friendship had once been abruptly ended by the bestowal of certain deep confidences by his friend, sad and touching confidences. This incident had drawn a veil between him and his friend, a veil that he could not withdraw. His evident coldness, on the day following, to the friend who had trusted him, disconcerted and repelled the other. Hugh could remember a mute and appealing look that he gave him; but though he felt that he was acting ungenerously and even basely, he could only meet it with a blank and repellent gaze, and the friendship had been broken off, never to be renewed. He had made, too, friends with women both of his own age and older; but the moment that the friendship seemed cemented, the emotion on Hugh's part cooled into a camaraderie which was both misunderstood and blamed. Why go so far if you did not mean to go further? appeared to be the unuttered question which met him; to which his own temperament seemed always to reply, why shake our easy and comfortable friendship by distracting and bewildering emotions? It was, Hugh grew to discern, a real blot in his character; it was a prudence, a caution in emotional things, a terror, no doubt, in a sensitive spirit, of giving pledges, of making vows, of surrendering the will and the spirit. It did not indeed bring him unhappiness—that was the saddest part of it; but it left him involved in a kind of selfish isolation. His soul, he felt, was like a smiling island, which with its green glades and soft turf invites the wayfarer to set foot therein, with a smiling welcome from the spirit of the place. But the wood once penetrated, then at the back of the paradise ran a cliff-front of sad-coloured crags, preventing further ingress. If indeed the shrine of the island had stood guarded within a temple which, in its deep columned and shadowed recesses, had shielded a holy presence, it would have been different; but the land beyond was bare and desolate. That was, Hugh thought, the solution. The bright foreshore, the waving trees, the shelter and fountains, seemed to promise a place of delicate delights; and there were some of those who landed there, who, on seeing the pale cliff behind, believed, with a deep curiosity, that some very sacred and beautiful thing must there be enshrined. But it was the emptiness of the further land, Hugh thought, that made it imperative to guard the mystery. In that bare land indeed he himself seemed to pace, bitterly pondering; he would even kneel on the bare rocks, and hold out his hands in intense entreaty to the God who had made him, and who withdrew Himself so relentlessly within the blank sky, that a blessing might tall upon the stony wilderness. But this blessing was withheld; whether by his own fault, or through the just will of the Father, Hugh could not wholly discern. The hard fact remained that the inner fortress was blank and bare, and that no friend or lover could be invited thither.

But as Hugh's manhood melted into his middle age, the conflict between the outer and inner spirit decreased. He was still, as ever, conscious of the coldness of his inner heart; but he grew to believe that a compromise was possible, and that his work was to cheer and welcome, with all the outer resources at his command, any pilgrims who sought his aid. He became patiently and unwearyingly kind. There was no trouble he would not take for any one who appealed to him. He gave a simple affection, a quiet sympathy, with eager readiness; and learned that, if he lacked that fiery and impetuous core of emotion, which can make the whole world different to those who can light their torches at its glow, yet he could smoothe the path and comfort the steps of less ardent, less impulsive spirits. He could add something of light and warmth to the cold world. If sometimes those who were attracted by his genial bearing and sympathetic kindness were disappointed and troubled at finding how slender a stream it was, well, that was inevitable. He realised himself that his was a shallow nature, full of motion and foam, wide but not deep, and that its bright force and swift curves hid from others, though not from himself, its lack of force and energy. And so when it came to him to lay aside his public work, and to enter a life which seemed an almost disappointingly meagre field to those who had formed high hopes of him, believing that he had a rich and prodigal nature, a depth of insight and force, he made the change himself with a fervent and abundant gratitude; feeling that he was unequal to the larger claims, and would but have attempted to hide his lack of force under a certain brisk liveliness and paradoxical display; while that in the narrow channel which his life now entered, he would at least be employing all the force of which he was capable.

He was not free from misgivings; but he felt that what appeared to be a shrinking and cowardly diffidence to others, was the inevitable result of the richness of his outer nature, the exuberance of which they held to issue from a reservoir of secret force; but, though he sighed at their disappointment, he felt that he was estimating himself more truly; and that he lacked that inner fulness of spirit, that patient unselfishness, which could alone have sustained him. He remained indeed a child, with the charm, the gaiety, the simplicity of a child, but with the wilfulness, the faint-heartedness, the desultoriness of a child. And he felt that in making his choice he was indeed following the will of his Father, making the most of his single talent, instead of juggling with it to make it appear to be two or even ten.

He had his reward in an immediate and simple tranquillity of spirit. He never doubted nor looked back. Those who saw him, and thought regretfully what he might have been, what he might have done, would sometimes give utterance to their disappointment, and even peevishly blame him. But here again his coldness of temperament assisted him. He submitted to such criticisms and censures with a regretful air, as though he were half convinced of their truth. But the severer and sterner spirit within was never touched or affected. Ambitious and fond of display as he had been, the loss of dignity and influence weighed nothing with him; he was even surprised to find how little it touched him with any sense of regret or yearning. His fear had been once that perhaps he was great, and that indolence and luxuriousness alone held him back from exercising that greatness. But God had been good to him in neither humiliating nor exposing him, and now that he himself had lifted the lid of the ark in the innermost shrine, and had seen how bare and unfurnished it was, he saw in a flash of humble insight how wisely he was held back.

Truth, however painful, has always something bracing and sustaining about it; and the days in which Hugh learnt the truth about himself had nothing of gloom or sadness about them. The discovery indeed surprised him with a certain lightness and freshness of spirit. He smiled to think that he had entered the vale of humiliation, and had found it full of greenness and musical with fountains. A great flood of peace flowed in upon him; and all the delicate love of nature, of trees and skies, of flowers and moving water, came back to him with an increased and deep significance. Before, he had seen their outward appearance; now he looked into their spirit; and so he passed along the dreary valley light of foot and singing to himself. Mr. Fearing, in the Pilgrim's Progress, went down from the House Beautiful into the valley, said Mr. Greatheart, "as well as ever I saw man in my life. I never saw him better in all his pilgrimage than when he was in that valley. Here he would lie down, embrace the ground, and kiss the very flowers that grew in the valley. He would now be up every morning by break of day tracing and walking to and fro in this valley."

Even so was it with Hugh. The place that he had feared was revealed to him in a moment as his native air. Men do not lose all of a sudden their temptations, and least of all those who have desired the prize rather than the labour. But Hugh saw that the place where he set his feet was holy. And as for his poor desires, he put them in the hands of his Father, and rejoiced to find that they were faithfully and serenely purged away.

He began to learn, but with what infinite difficulty, what entanglement of delay, that the great mistake that he had made in his religious life, was the limiting the direct influence of God to the pietistic, the devotional region. All the tender and remote associations of childhood had to be broken off and drawn away one by one, as one snaps and pulls ivy down from a wall, before he could reach the thought he was approaching; and how often, too, did the old conception surprise him, interrupt him, entangle him again unawares! It seemed to Hugh, reflecting on the problem, how strange a thing was the pageant of life all about him, the march of invisible winds, the sweeping up of cloudy vapours, the slow ruin of rocky places, the spilling of sweet streams; and then, in a nearer region, the quaint arbitrary forms of living creatures, their innate instincts, their intelligence, so profoundly and delicately organised in one direction, so weak in another; and then again the horrible threads of cruelty, of suffering, of death, inwoven so relentlessly in the fabric of the world, the pitiless preying of beast upon beast; and, further still, the subtle and pathetic wisdom of the human spirit, sadly marking what is amiss, and setting itself so feebly, so pitifully, to amend it; the shaping of communities, the social moralities, so distinct from, so adverse to the morality of nature—reflecting, as I say, on these things, Hugh became aware, with a growing astonishment, that though mankind attributed, in an easy and perfunctory way, all these phenomena to the creative hand of God, yet instead of trying to form a conception of Him and His dark thoughts from this legible and gigantic handwriting, which revealed so impenetrable, so imperturbable a will, they sought to trace His influence only in some bewildered region of the human spirit, the struggles of inherited conscience, the patient charity of men, that would seek to knot up the loose ends which, in their pathetic belief in self-developed principles, they could not help imagining that the Maker of all had left unravelled and untied.

To believe in God and yet to seek to improve upon His ways! what a strange and incredible contradiction! And yet what made the position a more bewildering one still was the certainty that these very inner impulses to amend, to improve, came from God as clearly as the very evils that He permitted and indeed originated. What was the exit from this intolerable tangle of thought? Law indeed seemed absolute, law on a scale at once so colossal and so minute, law that sent the planets whirling through space round the central sun—and yet dwelt, cell within cell, in the heart of the smallest pebble that rolled upon the sea-beach. And side by side with this law ran a thwarting force, an impulse to make man do blindly the very things that led inevitably to destruction, to endow him with an intense desire of life, and yet to leave him ignorant of the laws that hurried him, reluctant and amazed, to death. Hugh grew to feel that some compromise was necessary; that to live in the natural impulses alone, or in the developed impulses alone, was an impossibility. A hundred voices called him, a hundred hands beckoned or waved him back; nature prompted one thing, reason another, association another, piety another; and yet each was in a sense the calling of God. The saddest thing was that to obey any of the voices brought no peace or tranquillity; he obeyed piety, and nature continued fiercely to prompt the opposite; he obeyed association, and reason mocked his choice. He became aware that in order to triumph over these manifold and uneasy contradictions, a certain tranquillity of mind must be acquired; he found that to a large extent he must trust intuition, which could at all events settle, if it could not reconcile, conflicting claims; even when reason indicated a choice of paths, the voice of the soul cried out clearly the way that he must choose; the obedience to intuition was generally approved by experience, until Hugh began to see, at last, that it was the safest guide of all, and that thus we came nearest to the heart of God. He found, indeed, very often, that even when prudence and reason afforded excellent reasons for abstaining from action, to yield to intuition turned out to be the wisest and the kindest course; until, in practical matters, he learnt to trust it unhesitatingly, even if it led him, as the light led the pilgrim, to stumble for a time in a field full of dark mountains.



XXI

A Far-off Day—A Compact—Fragrant Memories

There was, as I have said, a strong visionary tendency in Hugh, which had been to a certain extent restricted in the days of his professional life; but now that he was free, it began to recur with extraordinary frequency and force. It was when he was reading that this faculty visited him, as a rule, and more especially when he read, as he was accustomed to do, after he was awake in the morning, until the time came for him to rise. The mind, struggling to free itself from the dominion of sleep, had not yet put on the obedience of the day, but seemed to act with a whimsical independence of its own. His thoughts were then most apt to wear a melancholy tinge; a certain apprehensive shadow often lay upon him, a sense of being unequal to the claims of the day, a tendency to rehearse, without hopefulness or spring, the part he would have to play, to exaggerate difficulties and obstacles. Reading, as a rule, served to distract his thoughts; but it was hardly an intellectual so much as a meditative process; the thoughts and words of the writer, on such occasions, often seemed to him like beaters going through a covert, trampling the fern and rapping the tree trunks, starting from their lairs all kinds of hidden game.

One morning he was lying thus, reading quietly, when there suddenly darted into his mind, for no particular reason, the thought of a summer day he had spent as a small boy at his public school. It had been a holiday; the day cloudless and bright, yet with a delicious coolness in the air; and the sunshine fell, he remembered, on the great trees of the place and the venerable buildings, gleaming through a golden haze, which made it seem as though he viewed everything, not through empty air, but through a tinted and tangible medium, as it were an aerial honey, which lent a liquid sweetness to all outlines and surfaces. He had wandered off with a friend, in that perfect afternoon, through the meadows, for a long vague ramble, ending up with a bathe in the river. The day was beautifully still, and he could almost smell the hot honied fragrance of the flowers, and hear the angry murmur of the busy flies, that sate basking on the leaves of the hedgerow. He seemed to himself to have been full of a vague and restless emotion, a sense of happiness that just missed its end, that would have been complete if there had not been something wanting, some satisfaction of an instinct that he could not put into words. His companion had been a boy of his own age, who, it had seemed to Hugh, was in the same wistful mood. But there had been no attempt to express in words any of these thoughts. They had walked for the most part in silence, interrupted by the vague, inconsequent, and rather gruff remarks, that are the symbols of equal friendship. They had rambled a long way beside the stream, with the thick water-plants growing deep at the edge. The river came brimming down, clear and cool, the tiny weeds swaying among the dark pools, the rushes bowing and bending, as though plucked by unseen hands. The stream was full of boys in boats, and the eager noise and stir was not congenial to Hugh's meditative mood. The bathing-place was by a weir, where the green water plunged through the sluices, filling the stream with foam and sound; all about floated the exquisite reedy smell of warm river-water, bringing with it a sense of cool and unvisited places, hidden backwaters among green fields, where the willows leaned together, and the fish hung mute in the pools. They had bathed under a tall grove of poplars, and Hugh could remember the delicious freshness of the turf under his naked feet, and the sun-warmed heat of the wooden beams of the wharf. The plunge in the cold bubbling water had swept all his thoughts away into the mere joy of life, but as he sat, after dressing, with the music of the water in his ears, the same wistful mood had settled down on his mind.