VII
Liberty--Cambridge--Literary Work--Egotism
The question which, when he resigned his appointment, occupied Hugh, was where he should live. He would have preferred to settle in the country, loving, as he did, silence and pure air, woods and fields. He had never liked London, though it had become endurable to him by familiarity. He decided, however, that at first, at all events, he must if possible find a place where he could see a certain amount of society, and where he would be able to obtain the books he expected to need. He was afraid that if he transferred himself at once to the country, he might sink into a morbid seclusion, as he had no strong sociable impulses. His thoughts naturally turned to his own university. He thought that if he could find a small house at Cambridge, suitable to his means, he would be able to have as much or as little society as he desired, while at the same time he would be on the edge of the country. Moreover the flat fenland, which is generally supposed to be unattractive, had always possessed a peculiar charm for Hugh. He spent some time at home, revelling in his freedom, while he made inquiries for a house. The thought of a long perspective of days before him, without fixed engagements, without responsibilities, so that he could come and go as he pleased, filled him with delight.
His father had not at all disapproved of the decision. Hugh had shown him that he was pecuniarily independent; but he was aware that in the background of his father"s mind lay the hope that, even so late in life, he might still be drawn to enter the ministry of the Church. At all events he thought that Hugh might gain some academical position; and thus he gave a decidedly cordial a.s.sent to the change, only expressing a hope that Hugh would not make a hurried decision.
Hugh did not delay to sketch out a plan of work. But whereas before he had worked only when he could, he now found himself in the blessed position of being able to work when he would. Instead of becoming, as he had feared, desultory, he found that his work exercised a strong attraction over him--indeed that it became for him, with an amazing swiftness, the one pursuit in the world about which exercise, food, amus.e.m.e.nt, grouped themselves as secondary accessories. This was no doubt in part accounted for by the fact that he had acquired a habit of regular work, a craving for steady occupation; but it was also far more due to the fact that Hugh had really, and almost as though by accident, discovered his ruling pa.s.sion. He was in truth a writer, a word-artist; his only fear was, whether, in the hard-worked unmitigated years of specified toil, he had not perhaps lost the requisite mental agility, whether he had not failed to acquire the elastic use of words, the almost instinctive sense of colour and motion in language, which can only be won through constant and even unsuccessful use. That remained to be seen; and meanwhile his plans settled themselves. He found a small, picturesque, irregularly-built house crushed in between the road and the river, which in fact dipped its very feet in the stream; from its quaint oriel and gallery, Hugh could look down, on a bright day, into the clear heart of the water, and survey its swaying reeds and poising fish. The house was near the centre of the town; yet from its back windows it overlooked a long green stretch of rough pasture-land, now a common, and once a fen, which came like a long green finger straight into the very heart of the town. There was a great sluice a few yards away, through which the river poured into a wide reach of stream, so that the air was always musical with the sound of falling water, the murmur of which could be heard on still nights through the shuttered and curtained cas.e.m.e.nts. The sun, on the short winter days, used to set, in smouldering glory, behind the long lines of leafless trees which terminated the fen; and in summer the little wooded peninsula that formed part of a neighbouring garden, was rich in leaf, and loud with the song of birds. The little house had, in fact, the poetical quality, and charmed the eye and ear at every turn, the whisper of the little weir outside seeming to brim with sweet contented sound every corner of the quaint, irregular, and low-ceiled rooms, with their large beams and dark corners.
So Hugh settled here after his emanc.i.p.ation, and for the first time in his life realised what it meant to be free. He woke day after day to the sensation that he had no engagements, no ties; that he could arrange his hours of work and liberty as he liked, go where he would; that no one would question his right, interfere with his independence, or even take the least interest in his movements. His freedom was at first, to his dismay, something of a burden to him; he had been used to ceaseless interruptions, multifarious engagements; the one struggle, the one preoccupation, had been to win a few hours for solitude, for reflection, for literary work. But now that the whole of time was at his disposal, he found himself unable to concentrate his mind, to apply himself. He had several friends at Cambridge; but the strain of making new acquaintances, of familiarising himself with the temperaments and the tastes of the new set of personalities, was very great. It was impossible for Hugh to enter upon neutral, civil, colourless relations.
He could not meet a man or a woman without endeavouring to find some common ground of sympathy and understanding. And this was made more difficult to him at Cambridge by the swift monotony in which the years had flowed away. Time seemed to have stood still there in those twenty years. Many of the men that he remembered seemed still to be there, contentedly pursuing the customary round, circulating from their rooms to Hall, from Hall to Combination-room, and back again. Thus Hugh, picking up the thread where he had laid it down, appeared to himself to be youthful, inexperienced, insignificant; while to those who made his acquaintance he seemed to be a grave and serious man of affairs, with a standing in the world and a definite line of his own.
Thus the first months were months of some depression. Not that he would have gone back if he could, or that he ever doubted of the wisdom, the inevitableness of the step; even in moments of dejection it cheered him to feel that he was not eating his heart out in fruitless work, or solemnly performing a duty, which relied for seriousness upon its outer place in a settled scheme, rather than upon any intrinsic value that it possessed. But his life soon settled down into a steady routine. He gave his morning to letters, business, and reading; his afternoons to exercise, his evenings to writing and academical sociabilities. His aim began gradually to be to make the most of the sacred hours of the late afternoon, when his mind was most alert, and when he seemed to possess the easiest mastery of language. He consecrated those hours to his chosen work, and it was his object to fit himself, as by a species of training, to make the most and best of that good time, which lay like gold among the debris of the day. It seemed to him that the solid, unimaginative work of the morning cleared away a certain heaviness and sluggishness of apprehension, which was the shadow of sleep; that the open air, the active movement of the afternoon, removed the clumsier and grosser insistence of the body; and that there resulted a frame of mind, when the imagination was lively and alert, and when the willing brain served out its stores with a cordial rapidity. There was a danger perhaps of selfish absorption in such a scheme of life; but at least no artist ever more sedulously cultivated the best and most fruitful conditions for the practice of his art. Hugh grew to have an almost morbid sense of the value of time. Interruptions, social entertainments, engagements which interfered with his programme, he resented and resolutely avoided. He became indeed aware that other people, to whom the value of his work was not apparent, were apt to regard the jealous arrangement of his hours as the mere whim of a self-absorbed dilettante. But that troubled Hugh little, because he realised that his only hope of doing sound and worthy work lay in making a sacrifice of the ordinary and trifling occupations of life, of forming definite habits, for the want of which so many capable and brilliant persons sink into unproductiveness.
Yet the life had a danger which Hugh did not at first perceive. It tended to concentrate his thoughts too much upon himself. His writings took on a personal colour, a warm, self-regarding light, of which his candid friends did not hesitate to make him aware. The bitterness of the slow progress of a book, and of the long time that must elapse between its execution and its appearance, is that the readers of it tend to consider that it reflects the exact contemporary thought of its writer. Hugh"s mind and personality grew fast in those days; and by the time that his friends were criticising a book as the outcome of his immediate thought, he was feeling himself that it was but a milestone on the road, marking a spot that he had left leagues behind him.
But the creative instinct, which had struggled fitfully with the hard practical conditions of his professional life, now took a sudden bound forward. His writing became the one important thing in the world for Hugh. He had gained, he found, through constant practice, dry as the labour had been, a considerable fluency and firmness of touch: now sentences shaped themselves under his hand like living things; words flowed easily from their abundant reservoir. Yet the peril, which he soon grew to perceive, was that his outfit of emotional experience, his knowledge of human life in its breadth and complexity, was very narrow and limited. He had seen life only under a single aspect, and that an aspect which, poignant and intense as it was, did not easily lend itself to artistic treatment. The result was that his outlook was a narrow one, and his mind was driven back upon itself. The need to speak, to express, to shape thoughts in appropriate words, so long repressed, so instinctive to him, became almost fearfully imperative.
He was haunted by a hundred ardent speculations in art, in literature, in religion, in metaphysics, all of a vague rather than a precise kind.
His mind had been always of a loose, poetical type, turning to the quality of things rather than to outward facts or practical questions.
Temperaments, individualities, appealed to him more than national movements or aspirations; and then the old love of nature came back like a solemn pa.s.sion.
This sudden growth of egotism and introspection tended to alarm and disquiet Hugh"s friends; they put it down to his severance from practical activities, and began to fear a morbid and self-regarding att.i.tude. Yet Hugh knew that it would right itself; it was but the completion of a process, begun in his college days, and checked by his early entry into professional life; it was a return of his youth, the natural fulfilment of that period of speculative thought, which a young man must pa.s.s through before he can put himself in line with the world.
And in any case it was inevitable; and Hugh was content as before to leave himself in the hand of G.o.d, only glad at least that a process which would naturally have been finished under the overshadowing of the melancholy of youth, could thus be worked out with the temperate tranquillity, the serenity of manhood.
VIII
Foundations of Faith--Duality--Christianity--The Will of G.o.d
After all the inevitable bustle, the moving and settling of furniture, the constant noting of small needs, the conferences with tradesmen, all the details inseparable from establishing a new home, had died away, Hugh found himself, as has been said, for the first time in his life in comparative solitude. He had a few old friends in Cambridge; but unless two men are members of the same college, meetings, in a place of many small engagements, have to be deliberately arranged. Hugh could always go and dine in the hall of his college, and be certain of finding there a quiet good-fellowship and a pleasant tolerance. But he had not as yet mastered the current of little incidents which furnish so much of the conversation of small societies: allusions to facts familiar to all beside himself were perpetually being made; and he knew that nothing is so tiresome as a would-be sympathetic questioner, who does not understand the precise lie of the ground. He had as yet no definite work; a literary task in which he was shortly to be engaged had not as yet begun; the materials had not been placed in his hands.
Thus compelled by circ.u.mstances to pa.s.s through a period of enforced retreat, Hugh resolved upon a certain course of action. He determined to put down in writing, for his own instruction and benefit, the precise position he held in thought--his hopes, his desires, his beliefs. He set to work, it must be confessed, in a melancholy mood, the melancholy that is inseparable from the position of a man who has lived a very full and active life, and from whom the burden of activities is suddenly lifted. Though the lifting of the weight was an immense relief, and though he could often summon back cheerfulness by reflecting how entire his freedom was, and how troublesomely he would have been occupied if he had still held his professional position, yet the mere fact that there was no longer any necessity to brace his energies and faculties to meet some particular call of duty, gave him s.p.a.ces of a flaccid dreariness, in which his accustomed literary work palled on him; one could not read or write for ever; and so he set himself, as I have said, to compose a memorandum, a _symbol_, so to speak, of his moral and intellectual faith.
He was surprised, as soon as he began his task, to find how much of what he had believed to be certainties shrank and dwindled. A perfect sincerity with himself was the only possible condition under which such a work was worth undertaking. A sincerity which should resolutely discard all that was merely traditional and customary, should emphasise nothing, should regard nothing as proved, in which hope outran scientific certainty.
He found then that his creed began with a deep and abiding faith in G.o.d; he believed, that is, in the existence of an all-pervading, all-powerful Will, lying behind and in the scheme of things.
Side by side with this belief, and inextricably interwoven with it, was his belief in his own ident.i.ty and personality. That was perhaps the only thing of which he was ultimately a.s.sured. But his experience of the world was that it was peopled by similar personalities, each of whom seemed equally conscious of a separate existence, who were swayed by motives similar in kind, though differing in detail, from the motives which swayed himself; beyond these personalities, lay whole ranges of sentient beings, which sank at last, by slow and minute gradations, into matter which seemed to him to be inanimate; but even all this was permeated by certain forces, themselves unseen, but the symptoms of which were apparent in all directions, such as heat, motion, attraction, electricity. He believed it possible that all these might be different manifestations and specimens of the same central force; but it was nothing more than a vague possibility.
He was next confronted with a mysterious fact. In every day and hour of his own life he was brought face to face with a double experience.
At moments he felt himself full of life, health, and joy; at other moments he felt himself equally subject to torpor, _malaise_, and suffering. What it was that made these two cla.s.ses of experience clear to him he could not tell; but there was no questioning the fact that at times he was the subject of experience of a pleasant kind, which he would have prolonged if he could; while at times he was equally conscious of experiences which his only desire was to terminate as speedily as possible.
This mystery, which no philosopher had ever explained, seemed to him to run equally through the whole of nature. He asked himself whether he was in the presence of two warring forces. Would the Will, whatever it was, which produced happiness, have made that happiness permanent, if it could? was it thwarted by some other power, perhaps equally strong--though it seemed to Hugh that the happiness of most sentient beings decidedly and largely predominated over their unhappiness--a power which was deliberately inimical to joy and peace, health and well-being?
It seemed to him, however, that the two were so inextricably intermingled, and so closely ministered, the one to the other, that there was an essential unity of Will at work; and that both joyful and painful experiences were the work of the same mind. He therefore rejected at the outset the belief that what was commonly called evil could be a principle foreign to the nature of the Will of G.o.d; and he put aside as childish the belief that evil is created by the faculty of human choice, setting itself against the benevolent Will of G.o.d; for benevolence thus hampered would at once become a mere tame and ineffective desire for the welfare of sentient things, and be wholly deprived of all the attributes of omnipotence. Besides, he saw the same qualities that produced suffering in humanity, such as the instincts of cruelty, l.u.s.t, self-preservation, manifesting themselves with equal force among those sentient creatures which did not seem to be capable of exercising any moral choice.
But in regarding nature, as revealed by the researches of scientists, he saw that there was a slow development taking place, a development of infinite patience and almost insupportable delay. Finer and finer became the organisation of animal life; and in the development of human life, too, he saw a slow progress, a daily deepening power of organising natural resources to gratify increasingly complicated needs.
Not only was an energy at work, but a progressive energy, bringing into existence things that were not, and revealing secrets unknown before.
He next attempted to define his moral belief; and here, too, he saw in the world a progressive force at work. He saw society becoming more and more refined, more desirous to amend faulty conditions, more anxious to alleviate pain; and this not only with self-regarding motives, but with a vital sympathy, which reached its height in the deliberate purpose of many individuals that, even if condemned to suffer themselves, they would yet spend thought and energy in relieving, if possible, the ills of others.
He saw in the teaching of Christ what appeared to be the purest and simplest attempt ever made to formulate unselfish affection. No teacher of morals had ever reached the point of inculcating upon men the belief that it was the highest joy to spend the energies of life in contributing to the happiness of others. Though he saw in the system of Christ, as popularised and interpreted, a whole host of insecure a.s.sumptions, unverified a.s.sertions, and even degrading traditions, yet he could not doubt of the Divine force of the central message. If he was not in a position to affirm with cert.i.tude the truth of the recorded events which attended the origin of the Christian revelation, he could yet affirm with confidence that in the teaching of Christ a higher range of emotion had been reached than had ever been approached before; and he saw that spirit, in countless regions, however slowly, leavening the thought, the instincts of the world. The question then resolved itself into a practical one. How in his own life was he to make the serenity, the happiness which he desired, predominate over the suffering, the discontent to which he was liable? Could it be done by an effort of mind? His professional life had shown him that activity had not brought him any peace of mind, princ.i.p.ally because the system which he was bound to serve demanded such immense expense of labour for purely unprofitable ends. It had not been part of the humble and necessary work of the world, which must be done by some one, if human beings are to live at all; it had only been the outcome of the needlessly elaborate life of a highly organised community. It had filled his life full of a futile intellectual toil. And then, the effect upon his own character had been to hamper and stunt his natural energies. It had given him false ideals and wrong motives.
Looking back at his own life, Hugh saw that ambition, in one form or another, had poisoned his spirit. He saw that the instinct to gain a supremacy at the expense of others had been the one serious motive pressed upon him from first to last; indeed the necessity for moral control had been really, though not nominally, urged upon him, on the ground that by yielding to bodily desires he would be likely to frustrate his visions of success. Only of late had he had any suspicion of the truth, that gentleness, peacefulness, kindness, sincerity, quiet toil, activity of body and mind, were the things that really made life sweet and joyful. Had he learned it too late to be able to exorcise the demons that had so long harboured in his soul? He feared so.
But at last, after long pondering, he arrived at his decision, which was that if indeed this vast and patient Will was in the background of all, the only way was to follow it, to lean upon it; above all things not to be distracted by the conventions of society, which, though they too, in a sense, had their origin in the Will of G.o.d, yet were things to be left behind, to be struggled out of. There might indeed be some natures to which such things were attractive and satisfying, but Hugh had no doubt that though they might attract him, they could not satisfy.
And yet over his thoughts there brooded the shadow of the sad possibilities that lay in wait for him, and of which he had already felt the touch--pain, weariness, a discontented mind, jealousy, despair, and at the end of all death, which closed the prospect whichever way he looked. But if these things too were of the very nature of G.o.d, His Will indeed, though obscure and terrible, the only way was in a patient and loving submission, a knowledge that they could not be wholly in vain; and so he resolved that his life should be even so; that he would embrace all opportunities of showing kindness, giving help to others; that he would live a simple life of labour, using his faculties to the uttermost, as G.o.d should provide; and that his whole being should be a deliberate prayer that he might do the Will of G.o.d as affected himself, without seeking the praise or recognition of men. He foresaw indeed much solitude, much weariness. G.o.d had never given him one whom he could unreservedly love, though He had sent him abundance of pure and n.o.ble friendships. Quiet dependence upon G.o.d, simplicity of life, a readiness to serve, a strenuous use of the gifts given to him; that was the faith in which Hugh, now late in life, and after what profitless squandering of energies, began his pilgrimage.
IX
Art--The End of Art
It seemed strange to Hugh to sit there as he did, in his quiet house beside the stream, with an active professional life behind him, and wonder what the next act would be. His time was now filled with an editorial task which would demand all his energies, or rather a large part of them; but editorial work, however interesting in itself--and the interest of his particular work was great--left one part of the mind unsatisfied; that part of the mind which desired to create some beautiful thing. Hugh"s difficulty was this, that he had no very urgent message, to use a dignified word, to deliver to the world.
Nowadays, to appeal to the world, it is necessary to do things, it would seem, in rather a strident way, to blow a trumpet, or wave a flag, or command an army, or reform a department of state, or control a railroad. Hugh had neither the power nor the will to write a virile book or a powerful story, or to take imagination captive. He did not wish to head a revolt against anything in particular. The day of the old, grim, sinister tyrannies, he felt, in the western corner of the world, was over, and the kind of tyranny that vexed his spirit was a far more secret and subtle distortion of liberty. It was the rule of conventionality that he desired to destroy, the appet.i.te for luxury, and power, and excitement, and strong sensation. He would have liked to do something to win men back to the joys that were within the reach of all, the joys of peaceful work, and simplicity, and friendship, and quiet hopefulness. These were what seemed to Hugh to be the staple of life, and to be within the reach of so many people. And yet he had no mission. He could only detest the loud voices of the world and its feverish excitements, with all his heart; and on the other hand he loved with increasing contentment the gentler and beautiful background of life, that enacted itself every day in garden and field and wood; the quiet waiting things, the old church seen over orchards and cottage-roofs, the deep pool in the reedy river, dreaming its own quiet dreams, whatever pa.s.sed in the noisy world. He was sure that those things would bring peace to many weary spirits, if they could but learn to love them.
Artists and musicians, Hugh felt, were the happiest of all people; for they made the beautiful thing that might stand by itself, without need of comment. The graceful boy or girl that they painted, undimmed by age and evil experience, looked down at you from the canvas with a pure and radiant smile, and became as it were a spring of clear water, where a soul might bathe and be clean. Or the picture of some silent woodland place, some lilied pool on a golden summer afternoon--how the peace of it came into the spirit, how it seemed to a.s.sure the heart that G.o.d loved beauty best, lavishing it with an unwearied hand, even where there could be none to behold it but Himself! Then the musician,--how he wove the airy stuff of sound, so that the pathos of the world, its heavy mysteries, its sunlit joys, started into life, embracing the soul, and bidding it not be faithless or blind. These were the pure gifts of art, the spells before which the dull conventions of the world, its noise and dust, crumbled into the ugly ashes that they really were.
Beside those magical secrets the clumsy art of the writer stood abashed. Those tints, those notes were such definite things; but in the grosser and more tainted medium with which writers dealt, where so much depended upon a.s.sociation and point of view, there was so much less certainty of producing the effect intended, that one faltered and lost faith. One thing was certain, that it was useless to _search_ for a mission; the purpose must descend from heaven, as the eagle pounced on Ganymede, and carry the trembling and awed minister high above the heads of men. But the only thing that the faithful writer could do was to map out some little piece of quiet work, make no vast design, seek for no large sovereignty; and then work patiently on with ever-present enjoyment, learning his art, gaining skill and mastery over his vast and complex instrument, till he gained certainty of touch and the power of saying, with perfect lucidity, with pure transparency of phrase, exactly what he meant; and then, behind his art, to live resolutely in his simple creed, whatever article of it he could master, sure of this, that if his inspiration came, he would be able to present it worthily; and if it did not come--well, his would have been a grave, quiet, gracious life, like the life of a song-bird that had never had an audience, or a stream which dropped in crystal cataracts from unvisited rocks, upon which no gazer"s eye had ever fallen. And so there shaped itself what must be for the lover of the beautiful the first article of his faith, the thought that the happiness of art came in the making, the weighing, the disposing, and not in the recognition of the triumph by others; and that the temptation to gain a hearing, to touch hearts, to sway emotions was a natural one enough, but that it must be the first of all to be discarded, as one set foot in the enchanted world, among the dim valleys and rock-ridges, the thickets and the plains, that stretched beyond the sunset and on to the sea"s rim,--that wider, more shadowy, more remote world of awe and mystery which lay so near, outside the window, at the opening of a door, at the sound of a voice, the glance of an eye, and in which one"s busy fevered life was set, like the print of the wind"s footstep in the crisping wave, on the surface of some vast unfathomable sea.
X
Retrospect--Renewal of Youth--The New Energy
In reading biographies of ill.u.s.trious personages, Hugh was often interested and surprised to compare the pictures of undergraduate life drawn there with his own experience of that period. They were generally related in the form of reminiscences, seen far-off, at the end of a long perspective of years. It was generally represented as a period of high enthusiasm, intense energy, eager work, unclouded happiness. The perception of great problems, n.o.ble thoughts, seemed in these reminiscences to have fallen on chivalrous minds with a deep natural joy. They recorded hours of matchless talk, ingenuous debate, brilliant wit, scintillating intellect. Hugh liked to believe that this was the case, but he often wondered whether it was not all heightened by retrospect, and whether the radiance of the whole picture was not merely the radiance of recollected youth. If the picture was a true one, then the later years of the men whose lives were thus told, of whom more than one were known personally to Hugh, must have been years of sad physical and mental decline. There was one person in particular, an eminent ecclesiastic, who had been a frequent guest at his father"s house, in whom Hugh had never discovered any particular swiftness of perception, of agility of mind, yet the reminiscences of whose undergraduate years were given in a vein of high enthusiasm.
This worthy clergyman had seemed, if his memory was to be trusted, to have been the shining centre of a group whose life threw the life of young Athens, as represented by Plato, into the shade. The man in question seemed, in later years, a st.u.r.dily built clergyman, slow and cautious of speech, brusque and even grim of address, sensible, devoted to commonplace activities, and with a due appreciation of the comforts and conveniences of life. His conversation had no suggestiveness or subtlety. He was grumpy in the morning and good-humoured in the evening. He seemed impatient of new ideas, and endowed with a firm grasp of conventional and obvious notions.
Hugh"s own recollection of his university days was very different, and yet he had lived in what might be called an intellectual set. There had been plenty of easy friendship, abundance of lively gossip, incessant and rather tedious festivities. Men had groaned and grumbled over their work, played games with hearty conviction, had nourished no great illusions about themselves and each other, had had few generous and ardent visions about art, poetry, or humanity; or, if they had, they had kept them to themselves with a very good show of contented indifference. There was indeed a little society to which Hugh had belonged, where books, and not very recondite ideas, of ethical or moral import, were discussed freely and amiably, without affectation, and occasionally with a certain amount of animation. But the arguments engendered were flimsy, inconsequent, and fantastic enough; the dialectic flashed to and fro, never very convincing, and mostly intended to aggravate rather than to persuade. Even at the time it had often appeared to Hugh to be shallow and flimsy. He had seldom heard a subject debated with any thoroughness or justice, and he had learnt far more from the preparation of occasional papers framed to initiate a discussion, than from any discussion that followed. The best thoughts that Hugh had apprehended in those days had been the thoughts that he had won from books; his mind had opened rapidly then, in the direction of a kind of poetical metaphysic, not deep speculation on the ultimate nature of things, so much as reflection on the more psychological problems of character and personality. It seemed to Hugh that his own mind, and the minds of those with whom he had lived, had been a ma.s.s of prejudices, of half-formed and inconsistent theories. None of them had had any policy into which they fitted the ideas that came to them; but a new and attractive idea had been seized upon, on its own merits, without any reference to other theories, or with any desire to co-ordinate it with other ideas, which were indeed just thrust aside to make room for the new one.
Hugh"s idea of mental progress, in his later years, was the slow dwelling upon some thought, the quiet application of it to other thoughts. It seemed an inversion of the ordinary method of progress, if the biographies that he read were true. Taking the case, for instance, of the particular man whom Hugh had known, and whose biography he had studied, he seemed in youth to have been generous, fearless, candid, and ardent, and life must have been to him a process of hardening and encrusting with prejudice; he seemed to have begun with a bright faith in ideas, and to have ended with a dull belief in organisations. He had begun by being thrilled with the beauty of virtue, and he had ended by supporting the G.F.S. Hugh"s experience was the exact opposite of this. He had begun, he thought, by being loaded and burdened with prejudices and stupid notions, acquired he knew not how; he had not doubted the value of authority, tradition, usage; as life went on, it seemed to him that he had got rid of his prejudices one by one, and that he had arrived, at the age of forty, at valuing sincerity, sympathy, simplicity, and candour, above dogma and acc.u.mulated beliefs. He had begun with a firm faith in systems and inst.i.tutions; he had ended by basing all his hopes on the individual.
He had begun by looking for beauty and perfection wherever he was told to expect it; if he had not discerned it, he had blamed his own dulness of perception. It had been a heavy and soulless business; and the real freshness of life, intellectual curiosity, mental independence, seemed to have come to him in fullest measure, just at the age when most men seemed to have parted with those qualities. As an undergraduate, he had been more aware of fitfulness and weariness than anything; only gradually had he become conscious of concentration, sustained zest, intention. Then he had tended to condemn enthusiasm as a species of defective manners. Now he lived by its steady light. Then he had been at the mercy of a new idea, an attractive personality. He shuddered to think how easily he had made friendships, and how contemptuously he had broken them the moment he was disappointed. Now he weighed and tested more; but at the same time he also opened his heart and his thoughts far more deliberately and frankly to sympathetic and generous people.
Hugh seemed to have found rather than to have lost his youth. His actual youth, indeed, seemed to him to have been a tremulous and listless thing, full of fears and sensibilities, feminine, unbalanced, frivolous. Life had so far been to Hugh pure gain. Looking back he saw himself irresolute, vague, sentimental, incapable of application, unmethodical, half-hearted. He had had none of the buoyancy, the splendid dreams, the sparkling ambitions that seemed, according to the records, to have been the stuff of great men"s youth.
He sate one day in the ante-chapel of his old college, through a morning service, listening, as in a dream, to the sweet singing within; it seemed but a day since he had sate in his stall, a fitful-hearted boy. The service ended, and the procession streamed out, the rich tints of the windows lighting up the faces and the white surplices of the men, old and young, that issued from the dark door of the screen.
Hugh felt within himself that he would not have the old days back again even if he could; he was nothing but grateful for the balance, the serenity, that life had brought him. He was conscious of greater strength, undimmed energy, increased zest; faltering indeed he was still, not better, not more unselfish; but he had a sense of truer values, more proportion, more contentment. The mysteries of life were as dark as ever, but at least he no longer thought that he had the key; in those days his little rickety system of life, that trembled in every breeze, had seemed for him to bridge all gaps, to explain all mysteries. Now indeed chaos stretched all about him, full of huge mists, dark chasms, hidden echoes; but he perceived something of its vastness and immensity; he had broken down the poor frail fences of his soul, and was in contact with reality. He did not doubt that he seemed to the younger generation an elderly and sombre personage, stumbling down the dark descent of life, with youth and brightness behind him; but that descent appeared to himself to be rather an upward-rising road, over dim mountains, the air glowing about him with some far-off sunrise. Poetry, art, religion--they meant a thousandfold more to him than they had meant in the old days. They had been pretty melodies, deft tricks of hand, choice toys then. Now they were exultations, agonies, surrenders, triumphs. The prospect of life had been to him in those days like misty ranges, full of threatening precipices, and dumb valleys in which no foot had trod. Now he saw from the hill-brow, a broad and goodly land full of wood and pasture, cl.u.s.tered hamlets, glittering, smoke-wrapt towns, rivers widening to the sea; the horizons closed by the blue hills of hope, from which life and love, and even death itself, seemed to wave hands of welcome ere they dipped to the unseen. He blessed G.o.d for that; and best of all he had now no desire, as he had had in the old days, to be understood, to be felt, to claim a place, to exercise an influence. He had put all that aside; his only concern was now to step as swiftly, as strongly as possible, upon the path that opened before him, caring little whether it led on to gra.s.sy moorlands, or sheltered valleys full of wood, or even to the towered walls of some strong city of G.o.d.