THE ; IBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF CAL [FORNIA LOS ANGELES ' fl- Jippej^the activities of human minds^werejhot the ripples of some central outward-speeding 1 force, but the irresistible inner motion, as to the loadstone or the vortex, which made itself felt j through the whole universe, material and im- * material alike. The intense desire to know, to solve, to improve, to gain a tranquil balance of thought, was nothing more, Hugh perceived, than this inward-drawing impulse, calling rather than coercing men to aspire to its own supreme serenity ; all our ideas of what was pure and beautiful and true, then, were the same vast centripetal force, moving silently inward ; all our sorrows, our mistakes, our sufferings, were but the checking of that overpowering influ- ence ; and any rest was impossible till we liacf drawn nearer to the central peace. This seemed to Hugh to be not a theory but an in- tensely inspiring and practical thought. How light-hearted, how brave a secret ! Instead of desiring that all should be made plain at once, one could rejoice in the thought that one was certainly speeding homewards ; and ex- Platonism 109 perience was no longer a blind conflict of forces, but a joyful near ing of the central sum of things. At all events, what a blithe- ness, what a zest it gave to the genius of Plato himself ! With what eager inquisitive- ness, in a sort of a childlike gaiety, he hurried hither and thither, catching at every point some bright indication of the delightful mystery. Plato seemed to differ from the serious and preoccupied philosophers in this, that while they were lost in a grave and anxious scrutiny of phenomena, he was rather penetrated by the cheerfulness, the romance of the whole business. /The intense personal emotions, which to the analytical philosophers seemed mere distracting elements, experiences to be forgotten, crushed and left behind, were to Plato supreme mani- festations of the one desire.) Onedesired^in others what one desired in God ; the sense of admiration, the longing for sympathy the de- sire that no close embrace, no passionate glance could satisfy, these were but deep yearnings after the perfect sympathy, the perfect under- standing of God. And thus when Plato appeared most to be trifling with a subject, to T>e turning it over and over as a man may turn about a crystal in his hands, watch- ing the lights blend and flash and separate on the polished facets, he was really draw- no Beside Still Waters ing nearer to the truth, absorbing its delicious radiance and sweetness. Those sunny morn- ings, spent in strolling and talking, in col" onnade or garden, in that imperishable Athens, seemed to Hugh like the talk of saints in some celestial city. Saints not of heavy and pious rectitude, conventional in pos- ture and dreary in mind, but souls to whom love and laughter, pathos and sorrow, were alike sweet. ^Instead of approaching life with a sense of its gravity, its heinousness, its complexity, timid of joy and emotion and delight, practising sadness and solemnity, Plato and his followers began at the other end, and with an irrepressible optimism believed that joy was conquering and not being conquered, that light was in the as- cendant, rippling outwards and onwards. And then the supreme figure of all, whether imagi- nary or not mattered little, Socrates himself, with what a^ joyfu^ soberness and - gravit / y*~3'id he move forward through experience, never losing his balance, but serenely judging all till the moment came for him to enter be- hind the dark veil of death ; and this he did with the same imperturbable good-humour, neither Jingering nor hasting, but with a tran- quil confidence that life was beginning rather than ending. , And then Hugh saw in a flash thatfthe essence The Pauline Gospel in of the Gospel itself was like that.y When he read the sacred record in the light of Plato, it seemed to him as if it must in some subtle way be pervaded by the same bright intuitions as those which lit up the Greek mind. It seemed to Hugh a strange and bewildering thing that (the pure message of simplicity and love, with its tender waiting upon God, its delight in flowers and hills, its love of great ideas, its rich poetry, its perfect art, had taken on the gloomy metaphysical tinge that StPaul, with all his^ genius, had contrived to communicate to it. j Surely it was intolerable to believe that all those subtle notions of sacrificial satisfaction, of justification, of substitution, had ever crossed the Saviour's mind at all. In a sense He ful- filled the Law and the Prophets, for they had laid down, in grief and doubt, a harsh code of morality, because they saw no other way of leavening the conscience of the world. But the Saviour, at least in the simple records, had not trafficked in such thoughts ; He had but shown the significance of the primary emotions, had taught humanity that it was free as air, dear to the heart of God, heir of a goodly in- heritance of love and care. St. Paul was ajpan of burning ardour, but had he^not made the mistake of trying to lend too intellectual, too erudite, too complicated a colour to it all? 1 1 2 Beside Still Waters The essence of *ha Qpsppl seemed to be that man should not be bound by the tradition of men ; but St. Paul had been so intent upon drawing in those to whom tradition was dear, that in trying to harmonise the new with the old, he had made concessions and developed doctrines that had detrimentally affected Christianity ever since, and gone near to cast it in a different mould. Of course there was a certain con- tinuity in religion, a development. But St. Paul was so deeply imbued with Rabbinical methods and Jewish tradition, that In his splen- did attempt to show that Christianity was the fulfilment of the Law, he had deeply infected the pure stream with Jewish ideas. The essence of Christianity was meant to be a tabula rasa. Christ bade men trust their deepest and widest intuitions, their sense of dependence upon God, their consciousness of divine origin. In this respect the teaching of Christ had more in common with the teaching of Plato, than the doctrine of St. Paul with the doctrine of Christ. Christ was concerned with the future, St. Paul with the past ; Christ was concerned with re- ligious instinct, St. Paul with religious develop- ment. The strength of the Gospel of Christ was that it depended rather on the poetical and emotional consciousness of religion, and thus made its appeal to the majority of the The Gospel and Plato 113 human race. Plato, on the other hagd. was too intellectual, and a perception of his doctrine was hardly possible except to a man of subtle and penetrating ability. Hugh wondered Qf)it would be possible to put the__doctryi_ofJP|atu in such a light that it would appeal to simple people ; he thought that it would be possible; and here he was struck by the fact that Plato,, like Christ, ernpjoyed the_devicejofjthe parable largely as a means of interpreting religious ideas. The teaching of the Gospel and the teaching of Plato were alike deeply idealistic. They both depended upon the simple idea that men could conceive of themselves as / better than they actually were, and upon the fact that such a conception is the strongest motiygjforce in the world in the direction of self-improvement. The mystery of conversion is nothing more than the conscious apprehen- sion of the fact that one's life is meant tojbe noble and beautiful, ancPtriat one has the poTver to make it nobler and more beautiful than it is. It seemed to Hugh, reflecting on the de- velopment of Christianity, that perhaps it was not too much to say that the Pauline influence had been to a great extent a misfortune^, it was true that in a sense he had resisted the Jewish tyranny, and moreover that his writings were 8 ii4 Beside Still Waters full of splendid aphorisms, inspiring thoughts, generous ideals. But he had formalised Christ- ianity for afl tfrat ; he had linked jtjplosely to the Judaic system ; he was ultimately respon- sible for Puritanism ; that is to say, it was his influence more than any other that had given the Jewish Scriptures their weight in the Christ- ian scheme. It seemed to Hugh to be a ter- rible calamity that he had reserved, so to speak, a place in the chariot of Christ for the Jewish dispensation ; it was the firm belief in the vital inspiration of the Jewish Scriptures that had produced that harsh and grim type of Christ- ianity so dear to the Puritan heart. With the exception of certain of the Psalms, certain por- tions of Job and of the Prophets, there seemed to HughTo be little in theJQfd Testament that did not merely hamper and encumber the re- ligion of Christ. What endless and inextricable difficulties arose from trying to harmonise the conception of the Father as preached by Christ, with the conception of the vindictive, wrathful, national, local Deity of the Old Tes- tament. {J.aw.^liiiJe countenance did Christ ever give to that idea ! He did not even think of the Temple as a house of sacrifice, but as a house of prayer ! How seldom He alluded to the national history! How human and temporary a character He gave to the Law of Moses ! How The Harmony 115 constantly He appealed to personal rather than to national aspirations ! How He seemed to insist upon the fact that^very man must make his religion out of the simplest elements of moral consciousness !/How often He appealed to the poetry of symbols rather than to the effectiveness of ceremony ! How little claim He laifjLjrt fcftsft in the Synoptic Gospels, to any divinity, and then rather in virtue of His perfect humanity! He called Himself the Son of Man ; in the only^ recorded payer He gave to His disciples, there was no hint that prayer should be directed to Himself ; it was all centred upon the Father. Here again the Aristotelian method, the de- light in analysis, the natural human desire to make truth precise and complete, had intruded itself. What was the Athanasian creed but an Aristotelian formula, making a hard dogma out of a dim mystery ? The outcome of it all for Hugh was the resolution that for himself, at all events, his business was to disregard tempta- tion to formularise his position. With one's limited vision, one's finite inability to touch a thought at more than one point at a time, one must give up all hope of attaining to a per- fected philosophical system. The end was dark, / the solution incomprehensible. He must rather live as far as possible in a high and lofty emo- n6 Beside Still Waters tion, beholding the truth by hints and glimpses, pursuing as far as possible all uplifting intuitions, all free and generous desires. It was useless vx to walk in a prescribed path, to frame one's life on the model of another's ideal. He must be open-minded, ready to revise his principles in the light of experience. He must hold fast to what brought him joy and peace. How restful after all it was to know that one had one's own problem, one's own conditions ! All that was necessary was to put one's self firmly and con- stantly in harmony with the great purpose that had set one exactly where one was, and given one a temperament, a character; good and evil desires, hopes, longings, temptations, aspira- tions. One could not escape from them, thank God. If one only desired God's will, one's sins and sufferings as well as one's hopes and joys all worked together to a far-off end. One must go straight forward, in courage and patience and love. XII HUGH made friends at Cambridge with a young Roman Catholic priest, who was working there. His new friend was a very simple-minded man ; he seemed to Hugh the only man of great gifts he had ever known, who was abso- lutely untouched by any shadow of worldliness. H ugh knew of men who resisted the temptations of the world very successfully, to whom indeed they were elementary temptations, long since triumphed over; but this man was the only man he had ever known who was gifted with qualities that commanded the respect and ad- miration of the world, yet to whom the tempta- tions of ambition and success seemed never to have appeared even upon the distant horizon. He was an interesting talker, a fine preacher, and a very accomplished writer ; but his interest was entirely centred upon his work, and not upon the rewards of it. He was very poor ; but he hacT no regard for anything luxury, power, position that the world could give him. He 117 n8 Beside Still Waters had no wish to obtain influence ; he only cared to make the work on which he was engaged as perfect as he could. The man was really an artist pure and simple ; he seemed to have little taste for pastoral work. One day they sat together, on a hot breath- less afternoon, in a college garden, on a seat beneath some great shady chestnut-trees, and looked out lazily upon the heavy-seeded grass of the meadow and the bright flower borders. The priest said to Hugh suddenly, " I have often wondered what your religion really is. Do you mind my spealcing of it ? You seem to me exactly the sort of man who needs a strong and definite faith to make him happy." Hugh smiled and said, "Well, I am try- ing, not very successfully I fear, to find out what I really do believe. I am trying to construct my 'faith from the bottom ; and I am anxious not to put into the foundations any faulty stones, anything that I have not really tested." " That is a very good thing to do," said the priest. " But how are you setting to work? " " Well," said Hugh, " I have never had time before to think my religion out ; I seem to have accepted all kinds of loose ideas and shaky tra- ditions. I want to arrive at some certainties ; I try to apply a severe intellectual test to Sacrifice 119 everything : and the result is that I seem obliged to discard one thing after another that I once believed." " Perhaps," said the priest after a silence, " you are doing this too drastically ? Religion, it seems to me, has to be apprehended in a dif- ferent region, the mystical region, the region of intuition rather than logic." "Yes," said Hugh, "and intuitions are what one practically lives by ; but I think that they ought to be able to stand an intellectual test too for, after all, it is only intellectually that one can approach them." The priest shook his head at this, with a half- smile. And Hugh added, "I wish you would give me a short sketch, in a few words if you can, of how you reached your present position." " That is not very easy," said the priest ; " but I will try." He sat for a moment silent, and then he said, " When one looks back into antiquity, before the coming of Christ, one sees / a general searching after God in the world ; the one idea that seems to run through all religions is the idea of sacrifice a coarse and brutal idea orTginallyTperhaps ; but the essence of it is that there is such a thing as sinfulness, and such a thing as atonement ; and that only through death can life be reached. The Jews came_ nearest to the idea of a personal God: 120 Beside Still Waters and the sacrificial system is seen in its fullest perfection with them. Then, in the wise coun- sels of God, it came about that our Saviour was born a Jew. You will say that I beg the question here ; but approaching the subject intellectually, one satisfies one's self that the purest and completest religion that the world has ever seen was initiated by Him ; it is im- possible, in the light of that religion, not to feel that one must give the greatest weight to the credentials which such a teacher put forward ; and we find that the claim that He made was that He was Himself Very God. The moment that one realises that, one also realises that there is no prima, facie impossibility that God should so reveal Himself for indeed it seems an idea which no human mind would dare to originate, except in a kind of insane delusion ; and the teaching of Christ, His utter modesty and meekness, His perfect sanity and clear- sightedness, make it evident to me that we may put out of court the possibility that He was under the influence of a delusion. He, it seems to me, took all the old vague ideas of sacrifice and consummated them ; He showed that the true spirit was there, hidden under the ancient sacrifices ; that one must offer one's best freely to God ; and in this spirit He gave Himself to suffering and death. He founded a society with The Church 121 a definite constitution ; He provided it with certain simple rules, and said that, when He was gone it would be inspired and developed by the workings of His Spirit. He left this society as a witness in the world ; it has de- veloped in many ways, holding its own, gain- ing strength, winning adherents in a marvellous manner. And I look upon the Church as the witness to God in the world ; I accept its de- velopments as the developments of the Spirit. I see many things in it which I cannot compre- hend; but then the whole world is full of myste- ries and the mysteries of the Church I accept in a tranquil faith. I have put it, I fear, very clum- sily and awkwardly ; but that is the outline of my belief and it seems to me to interpret the world and its secrets, not perfectly indeed, but more perfectly than any other theory." " I see ! " said Hugh, " but I will tell you at once my initial difficulty. I grant at the out- set that the teaching of Christ is the.pu.rest and best religious teaching that the world has ever seen ; but I look upon Him, not^as the founder of a system, but as the most entire individual; ist that the world has ever known. It seems to me that (aln His teaching was directed to the end that we should believe in God as a loving Father, and regard all men as brothers ; the principle which was to direct His followers was 122 Beside Still Waters to be the principle of gerfectlove. and I think that His idea was that, if men could accept that, everything else mattered little. They must live their lives with that intuition to guide them ; the Church seems to me but the human spoiling and complicating of that great simple idea. I look round and see other religious systems of the world Mohammedanism, Bud- dhism, and the rest. In each I see a man of profound religious ideals, whose system has been adopted, and then formalised and vitiated by his followers. I do not see that there is anything to make me believe that thejsame process has not taken place in Christianity. The elaborate system of dogma and doctrine seems to me a perfectly natural human process of trying to turn ideas, essentially poetical, into definite and scientific truths, and half its errors to arise from feeling the necessity of reconciling and harmonising ideas, which I have described as poetical, which were never meant to be re- conciled or harmonised. And then there is the added difficulty that, owing to the system of the Church, the ideas of the earliest Christian teachers, like St. Paul, have been accepted as infallible too ; and hence arises the dilemma of having to bring into line a whole series of state- ments, made, as in St. Paul's case, by a man of intense emotion, which are neither consistent Christianity 123 with each other, nor, in all cases, with the teaching of Christ. My idea of Christianity is to get as close to Christ's own teaching as possible^ 1 do not concern myself with the historical accuracy of the Gospel narratives, or even with the incidents there recorded. Those records are the work of men of very imperfect education, and feeble intellectual grasp, in the grip of the prejudices and be- liefs of their age. But their very imperfection makes me feel more strongly the august per- sonality of Christ, because the principles, which they represent Him as maintaining, seem to me to be entirely beyond anything that they could themselves have originated. It seems to me, if I discern Christ rightly speaking of Him now purely as a man that if He could return to the earth, and be con- fronted with the system of any of the Churches that bear His name, He would declare it to be all a horrible mistake. It seems to me that what He aimed atwasa strictly individualistic '" 'Jffjr^TlIMM lll*'lllrrf ^^fc^^^^^^^^afca^ja-^^*"* system, an attitude of sincerity, simplicity, and" loving-kindness, free from all formalism (which He seems to have detested above every, thing), and free, too, from all elaborate and metaphysical dogma. Instead of this, He would find that men had seized upon the letter, not the spirit, of His teaching, and had devised a 124 Beside Still Waters huge mundane organisation, full of pomp and policy, elaborate, severe, hard, unloving. Now if I apply my intellectual tests to the central truths of Christianity, such as the law of Love, the powejr o self^acrifice, the brotherhood of men, they stand the test ; they seem to contain a true apprehension of the needs of the world, of the methods by which the happiness of hu- manity may be attained. But when I apply the intellectual test to the superstructure of any Church, there are innumerable doctrines which appear to me to be contrary to reason. It is difficult indeed, in this world of mystery, to affirm that any mystical claim is not true, but such claims ought not to appear to be repug- nant to reason, but to confirm the processes of reason, in a region to which reason cannot scientifically and logically attain. Such doc- trin.es, for instance, as prayers to saints for their intercession, or the efficacy of masses for the dead, seem to me to have a certain poetical beauty about them, but to be contrary both to reason and experience. I do not see the slight- est hint of them in the teaching of Christ, or anything which can be taken as giving them any support whatever. They seem to me purely human fancies, hardened into a pain- ful mechanical form, which forfeit all claim to be inspired by the Spirit of Christ. But Christianity 125 I must apologise for giving you such an harangue still, you brought it on yourself." The priest smiled quietly. " I quite see your point," he said, " and we are at one in your main position ; the difficulty of the Church is that it has to organise its system for people of all kinds oT"Temperament, and at all stages of develop- ment. But the spirit is there and if one lets go of the letter, the grasp of many human beings is so weak that they tend to lose the spirit. The Church no doubt appears to many to be over- organised, over-definite, but that is a practical difficulty which every system which has to deal with large masses of people is confronted with. It is the same with education ; boys have to do many definite and precise things which seem at the time to have no educational value; but at the end of their time they see the need of these processes." Hugh laughed. " I wish they did ! " he said ; "my own belief is that, in educationjag well as in religion, we want more individualism, more o ' *..* elasticity. I think it is very doubtful whether great ideas, rigidly interpreted and mechanically enforced, have any value at all for undeveloped minds ; the whole secret lies in their being liber- ally and freely apprehended. " " What really divides us," said the priest " and I do not think we are very far apart is 126 Beside Still Waters my belief that God has not left the world with- out a definite witness to Himself which I be- lieve the Church to be." " Yes," said Hugh, " I believe that the Church is a witness to God : anyjsysjtejEn which teaches pure morality is that ; but I could not limit His witness to a single system ; Nature, beauty, music, poetry, art to say nothing of sweet and kindly persons they are all the witnesses of His spirit ; and the Church is, in my belief, simply hampered and restricted from doing what she might, by the woful rigidity, the mechanical and hard precision, which she has imported into the spiritual region. The mo- ment that the liberty of the spirit is restricted, and grace is made to flow in definite traditional channels, that moment the stream loses its force and brightness." " I should rather believe," said the priest, " that, with all the obvious disadvantages of organisation, left to itself, the stream welters into a shapeless marsh, instead of making glad the City of God ! And may I say that you, and those like you, with ardent spiritual instincts, make the mistake of thinking that we exclude you ; indeed it is not so. You would find the yoke as easy and the burden as light as ever. In submission you would gain and not lose the liberty of which you are in search." Certainty 127 The priest soon after this took his leave. Hugh sat long pondering, as the evening faded into dusk. Was there no certainty, then, at- tainable ? And the answer of his own spirit was that no ready-made certainty was of avail ; that a man must begin from the beginning, and con- struct his own faith from the foundation ; that reason must play its part, lead the soul as far as it could, and set it in the right way ; but that the spjrit must not halt there, but pass courage- ously and serenely into the tractless waste, content, if need be, to make mistakes, to retrace its path, only sincerely and gently advancing, waiting for any hint that might fall from the Divine Spirit, interpreting rather than selecting, divesting itself of preferences and prejudices one by one, and conscious that One waited, smiling and encouraging, but a little ahead upon the road, and that any turn in the path might reveal his bright coming to the faithful eye. XIII THE charm of the Cambridge life was to Hugh the alternation of society and solitude. He was soon fortunate enough to obtain a post at^his old college, and to be allotted a set of rooms there. He was sociably enough inclined, and the stir and movement of the minute soci- ety was interesting and enlivening. He had a little definite work to do, and he tried to culti- vate relations with every one in the college. It was pleasant that he had no connection with disciplinary matters ; and thus he was able to enter into a friendly intercourse with the under- graduates, not checked or hampered by any necessity to find fault or to offer advice. He occupied his rooms during term-time, and lived the life of the college with quiet enjoyment. But he retained his little house as well, and when the vacation began, he retired there, and spent his days much in solitude. He preferred this indeed to the life of the college, but he was well aware that it owed half its pleasure to its being an interlude in the busier life. But 128 Waiting for Light 129 it was thus that what he felt were his best thoughts came to him ; thoughts, that is to say, that pierced below the surface, and had a qual- ity of reality which his mind, when he was employed and full of schemes, often seemed to himself to lack. But, like all spe.culat[yp he seemed to himself very soon to cross the debatable ground in which people of definite religious views appeared to him to linger gladly. Here he left behind all Jthe. prsans,..^hp..,jclf pended^ugon i systjgms. Here remained Roman Catholics, who depended chiefly upon the authority and tradition of the Church, and Pro- testants depending no less blindly and compla- cently upon the authority of the Bible. The real and crucial difficulty lay further on ; and it was simply this : he saw a world full of joy, and full too of suffering; sometimes one of his fel- low-pilgrims would be stricken down with some incurable malady, and through slow gradations of pain, sink wretchedly to death ; was this suf- fering remedial, educative, benevolent? He hoped it was, he believed that it was, in the sense, at least, that he could not bear to feel that it might not be ; but however ardently and eagerly he might try to believe it, there was always the dark alternative that pain might not be either remedial or educative; there was the 130 Beside Still Waters terrible possibility that identity and personal consciousness were absolutely extinguished by- death , for there was, no sort of evidence to fhe contrary ; andf if Jhis was the case, what remained of all h'urhan belief, philosophies, and creeds ? They might simply be beautiful dreams, adorable mistakes, exquisite fallacies : but they could supply no inspiration for life, unless there was an element of absolute cer- tainty about them, which was just the element that they lacked ; and, in any case, the sad fact that such certainties as men professed differed from and even contradicted each other, intro- duced a new bewilderment upon the scene. A Romanist maintained the absolute divinity of the Church; a Protestanj maintained the abso- lute reliability of the Bible ; both of these could not be true, because in many points they gnqtraygped each other ; the authority of the Church contradicted the authority of the Bible, while neither was perfectly consistent even with itself. They could not both be true, and Hugh was forced to believe that the point in which they were both in error was in their claim to * aj^y absolute certainty at all. The conclusion -'seemed to be that one must take refuge in a perfect sincerity, not formulate one's hopes as beliefs, but wait for light, and keep the eyes of the mind open to all indications of any kind Waiting for Light 131 that one must, in the words of the old wise proverb, be ready to begin one's life afresh many times, in the light of any new knowledge, any hint of truth. And thus one kind of hap- piness became impossible for Hugh, the happi- ness that comes of absolute certainty, when one may take a thing for granted, and not argue_any more about it ; that was the sort~ol happiness which mauy of his friends seemed to him to attain ; andjjfxlife did indeed end with, death, it was probably the best practical sys- tem to adopt ; but Hugh could not adopt it ; and therefore the only happiness he could expect was a candid and patient waiting upon truth, a welcoming of any new experience with a balanced and eager mind. To some a human love, a human passion, seemed the one satisfy- ing thing, but this was denied to Hugh and the only thing in his life which was of the nature of a passion was the sight of the beauti- ~' ~ TT fmmmm . ,- . , ,^ti ] g "~~ ful world about him, which appealed to him day by day with a hundred delicate surprises, unnumbered novelties of rapture. He realised that the one thing that he dreaded was a cold tranquillity, uncheered by hope, unresponsjye to beauty. He rode one day, in the height of summer, for miles across the fenland. To left and right lay the huge plain with its wide fields, its soli- 132 Beside Still Waters tary trees; to his left, between grassy flood- banks, ran the straight reedy river, full to-day of the little yellow water-lily, golden stars ris- ing from the cool floating leaves ; far ahead ran a low wooded ridge, with house-roofs clustering round a fantastic church tower, with a crown of pinnacles. Cattle grazed peacefully, and the whole scene was brimful of sweet passion- less life, ineffable content. If he could only have shared it! Yet the sight of it all filled him with a sweet hopefulness ; he travelled on, a lonely pilgrim, eager and wistful, desiring knowledge and love and serenity. He felt that they were waiting, certainly waiting ; that they were tenderly and wisely withheld. That was the nearest that he could come to his heart's desire. // ^ XIV IT was always a greatjjleasure to Hugh toj^x- plore an unfamiliar^ countryside, and the same pleasure was derivable to a certain extent from railway travelling, though the vignettes that one saw from the windows of a swiftly-rolling train were so transitory and so numerous, that one had soon the same sense of fatigue that comes from turning over a book of photographs, or from visiting a picture-gallery. If one explored the country in a leisurely manner it was less fa- tiguing, because one could taste the savour of a sight at one's ease. Hugh came to the conclu- sion, as life advanced, that he preferred a land- scape on which humanity had set itsjrnark^to a landscape of a pure, natural wildness, though th'at indeed had a beauty of its own, a more solemn beauty, though not so near to the heart. But the great red-brick house, peering through its sun-blinds, among the flower-beds, with a rookery behind in the tall trees of a grove, and the cupola of stable-buildings among the shrub- beries, that one saw in a flash as the train 133 134 Beside Still Waters emerged from the low cutting; or the tiled roofs of houses, with an old mouldering church- tower peering out above them, in a gap between green downs; or a quiet manor-house among pastures, seen at the close of day when the shadows began to lengthen, gave him a sense of the long succession of peaceable lives the boy returning from school to the familiar home, or the old squire, after a life of pleasant activities, walking among the well-known fields, and know- ing that he must soon make haste to be gone and leave his place for others. There was a sense of romance and pathos about it all; and the scenes thus unfolded suddenly before his eyes were dear to him because they had been dear to others, and stood for so much old tender- ness and anxious love. There was always., too, a feeling in his mind of how easy, how sweet and tranquil, life would be under such condi- tions. Seen from outside, certain lives, lived in beautiful surroundings and tinged with seemly traditions, seemed to have a romantic quality, even in their sufferings and sorrows. No amount of experience, no accumulation of the certainty that life was interwoven with a sordid and dreary fibre, seemed ever to dispel this il- lusion, just as sorrows and miseries depicted in a book or in a drama appeared to have a romance about them which, seen from inside, Dreariness 135 they lacked. There were in Hugh's own memory a few places and a few houses, where by some happy fortune the hours had always been touched with this poetical quality, and into which no touch of dreariness had ever entered. Something of the same romance lingered for Hugh over certain of the colleges at Cambridge. To wander through their courts, to read the mysterious names inscribed over unknown doors, to think of the long succession of inmates, grave or light-hearted, that_Jived within, either for a happy space of youth, or through long quiet years ; this never ceased to communicate to him a certain thrill of emotion. The only period of his life that seemed to Hugh to lack this quality of poetry were the years of his official life in London, the years that the locust had eaten. He did not grudge hav- ing spent them so, for they had given a sort of solidity and gravity to life ; but now that he was free to live as he chose, he determined that he would, if he could, so spend his days, that there should be as little as possible of this dull and ugly quality intermixed with them ; the sadness and incompleteness of countless lives seemed to Hugh to arise from the fact that so many men settled down to mechanical toil, which first robbed them of their freshness, and then routine became essential to them. But >^ 136 Beside Still Waters Hugh determined that neither his work nor his occupation should have this sunless and dismal quality ; that he would deliberately eschew the things that brought him dreariness, and the people who took a mean and conventional view; that he would not take up, in a spirit of heavy rectitude, work for which he knew himself to be unfit ; and that such mechanical work as he felt bound to undertake should be regarded by him in the light of a tonic, which should enable him to return to his chosen work with a sense of gladness and relief. This would demand a certain sustained effort, he foresaw. But whatever qualities he pos- sessed, he knew that he could reckon upon a vital impatience of things that were dull and common ; moreover it was possible to determine that, whatever happened, he would not do things in a dull way ; so much depended upon how they were handled and executed. One of the * dullest things in the world was the multiplica- n of unnecessary business. So many people made the mistake of thinking that by minute organisation the success of a system could be guaranteed. Hugh knew that the^reaj^ secret was to select the right personalities, and to leave systems elastic and simple, and that thus the best results were achieved ; the most depressing thing in the world was a dull person administer- Romance 137 ing faithfully an elaborate system ; one of the most inspiring sights was an original man mak- ing the best of a bad system. And so Hugh resolved that he would bring to his task, his leisure, his relations with others, his exits and entrances, his silence and his speech, a freshness^ and a zest, no^direc^djfl. surprising or interesting others -that was the most vulgar expedient "f allhut with a. rfo, *-* A VMMMHMMMMH^^* liberate design to transmute, as by the touch of "the magical stone, the common materials of life into pure gold. He would endeavour to _ ii ummm ffr^* i~^^*^^B discern the poetical quality in everything and in every one. In inanimate things this was easy enough, for they were already full of pun- gent distinctness, of subtle difference ; it was all there, waiting merely to be discerned. With people it was different, because there were so many who stared solemnly and impenetrably, who repelled one with remarks about the weather and the events of the day, as a man repels a barge with a pole. With such people it would be necessary to try a number of con- versational flies over the surface of the sleeping pool, in the hope that some impulse, some pleasant trait would dart irresistibly to the sur- face, and be hauled struggling ashore. Hugh had seen, more than once, strange, repressed, mournful things looking out of the guarded 138 Beside Still Waters eyes of dreary persons ; and it would be his business to entice these to the light. He de- termined, too, to cultivate thejart of being .alone. (There were many people in the world who found themselves the poorest of all com- pany, and Hugh resolved that he would find his own society the most interesting of all ; he would not be beaten by life, as so many people appeared to him to be. Of course, he knew that there were threatening clouds in the sky, that in a moment might burst and drench the air with driving rain. But Hugh hoped that his attitude of curiosity and wonder could find food for high-hearted reflection even there. The n ni verse teemed with significance, and if God had bestowed such a quality with rich abundance everywhere, there must be a still larger store of it in His own eternal heart. The world was full of surprises ; trees drooped their leaves over screening walls, houses had backs as well as fronts ; music was heard from shut- tered windows, lights burned in upper rooms. There were a thousand pretty secrets in the ways of people to each other. Then, too, there were ideas, as thick as sparrows in an ivied wall. One had but to clap one's hands and cry out, and there was a fluttering of innumer- able wings ; life was as full of bubbles, forming, rising into amber foam, as a glass of sparkling The Choice of Work 139 wine. That cup he would drink, and try its savour. There would be times when he would flag, no doubt, but it should not be from any failure of desire. He would try to be tem- perate, so as to keep the inner eye unclouded ; and he would try to be perfectly simple" anoT sincere, deciding questions on their own merits, and with no conventional judgment. Such an attitude might be labelled by peevish persons, with prejudices rather than preferences, a species of intellectual Epjcjjreanjsm. But Hugh de- sired not to limit his gaze by the phenomena of life, but to keep his eyes fixed upon the fur- ther horizon ; the light might dawn when it was least expected ; but" the best chance of catch- ing the first faint lights of that othej^ sunrise, was to have learned expectancy, to have trained observation, and to have kept one's heart unfettered and undimmed. He saw that the first qsg^Bjjg^ ftf ?Hiwas to Of F ntT "" kinrl, to have a chosen work, to which he should be vowed as by a species of consecration ; it was in choosing their life-work, he thought, that so many people failed. He saw men of high abil- ity, year after year, who continued to put off the decision as to what their work should be, until they suddenly found themselves con- fronted with the necessity of earning their Beside Still Waters living, and then their choice had to be made in a hurry ; they pushed the nearest door open and went in ; and then habit began to forge chains about them ; and soon, however un- congenial their life might be, they were in- capable of abandoning it. There were some melancholy instances at Cambridge of men of high intellectual power, who had drifted thus into the academical life without any aptitude for it, without educational zeal, without in- terest in young people. Such men went on tamely year after year, passing from one college . office to another, inadequately paid, with no belief in the value of their work, averse to trying experiments, fond of comfort, only anxious to have as little trouble as possible, expending their ingenuity of mind in academi- cal meetings, criticising the verbal expression of reports with extreme subtlety, too fastidious to design original work, too much occupied for patient research, and ending either in a bitter sense of unrecognised merit, or in a frank and unashamed indolence. Hugh saw that in choosing the work of one's life, one must not be guided by Necessity, or even mere rectitude. Work embraced from a sense of duty was like driving a chariot in sea- sand. One must have an enthusiasm for one's task, and a delight in it; for only by enjoyment The Choice of Work 141 of the results could one tolerate the mechanical labour inseparable from all intellectual toil. It was true that he had himself drifted into offi- cial duties, but here Hugh saw the guidance of a very tender providence, which had provided him with a species of discipline, that he could never have spontaneously practised. His great need had been the application of some harden- ing and hammering process, such as should give him that sort of concentrated alertness which his education had failed to bestow ; and none the less tenderly provided, it seemed to Hugh, n that could satisfactorily account for life as we found it was, that either it was an educational progress, and that we were being prepared for some further exist- ence, for which in some mysterious way our experience, however mean, miserable, and un- gentle must be intended to fit us ; or else it was all a hopeless mystery, the work of some prodigious power who neither loved or hated, but just chose to act so. In any case it was a very slow process ; the world was bound with innumerable heavy chains. There was much cruelty, stupidity, selfishness, meanness abroad ; all those ugly things decreased very slowly, if indeed they decreased at all. Yet there seemed, too, to be a species of development at work. But the real mysjejry lay in _the fact that while our hopes and intuitions pointed to there being a great and glorious scheme in the background, our reason and experience alike tended to contradict that hope. How little one changed as thej^ears \ent pnj[^ How^in-. erad.icable our faults seemed ! How ineffectual efforts! God indeed seemed to implant 260 Beside Still Waters in us a wish to improve, and then very often seemed steadily and deliberately to thwart that wish. And then, too, how difficult it seemed really to draw near to other people ; in what a terrible ; even in the midst of a cheerful and merry company, how the secrets of one's heart hung like an invisible veil between us and our dearest and nearest. The most one could hope for was to be a pleasant and kindly influence in the lives of other people, and, when one was gone, one might live a little while in their memories. The fact that some few healthily organised people contrived to live simply and straight- forwardly in the activities of the moment, without questioning or speculating on the causes of things, did not make things simpler for those on whom these questions hourly and daily pressed. The people whom one accounted best, did indeed spend their time in helping the happiness of others ; but did one perhaps only tend to think them so, because they ministered to one's own contentment ? The only conclusion for Hugh seemed to be this: that one must have a work to be faithfully and resolutely fulfilled ; and that, outside of that, one must live tenderly, simply, and kindly, adding so far as one might to the happiness of A Conclusion 261 others ; and that one might resolutely eschew all the busy multiplication of activities, which produced such scanty results, and were indeed mainly originated in order that so-called active, people might feel themselves to be righteously employed. f XXVII ONE hot still summer day Hugh went far afield, and struck into a little piece of country that was new to him. He seemed to discern from the map that it must have once been a large, low island almost entirely surrounded by marshes ; and this turned out to be the case. It was approached along a high causeway crossing the fen, with rich black land on either hand. No high-road led through or out of the village, nothing but grass-tracks and drift-ways. The place consisted of a small hamlet, with an old church and two or three farmhouses of some size and antiquity ; it was all finely timbered with an abundance of ancient elm-trees every- where ; they stood that afternoon absolutely still and motionless, with the sun hot on their towering heads ; and Hugh remembered how, long ago, as a boy at school, he used to watch, out of the windows of a stuffy class-room, the great elms of the school close rising just thus in the warm summer air, while his thoughts wandered from the dull lesson into a region 262 The Golden Hour 263 of delighted, irrecoverable reverie. To-day he sat for a long time in the little churchyard, the bees humming about the limes with a soft mu- sical note, that rose and fell with a lazy cadence, while doves hidden somewhere in the elms lent as it were a voice to the trees. That soft note seemed to brim over from a spring of measure- less content ; it seemed like the calling of the spirit of summer, brooding in indolent joy and innocent satisfaction over the long sweet hours of sunshine, while the day stood still to listen. Hugh resigned himself luxuriously to the soft influences of the place, and felt that for a short space he need neither look backwards nor for- wards, but simply float with the golden hour. At last he bestirred himself, realising that he had yet far to go. It was now cold and fresh, and the shadows of the trees lay long across the grass. Hugh struck down on the fen and walked for a long time in the solitary fields, by a dyke, passing a big ancient farm that lay very peacefully among its wide pastures. The thought of the happy, quiet-minded people that might be living there, leading their simple lives, so little affected by the current of the world, brought much peace into Hugh's mind. It seemed to him a very beautiful thing, with something ancient and tranquil about it. It was all utterly remote from ambition and 264 Beside Still Waters adventure, and even from intellectual efficiency ; and here Hugh felt himself in a dilemma. His /faith Hid .nrtt peflpii: j|im fa {Ifit'frt **[?* the civ- ilisation and development of the world were in accordance with the purpose of God on the one hand, and yet, on the other hand, that ex- pansion brought with it social conditions and problems that appeared to him of an essentially ugly kind, as the herding of human beings into cities, the din and dirt of factories, the millions of lives that were lived under almost servile conditions ; and so much of that sad labour was directed to wrong ends, to aggrandisement, to personal luxury, to increasing the comfort of oligarchies. The simple life of the country- side seemed a better ideal, and yet the lot of the rustic day-labourer was both dull and hard. It looked sweet enough on a day of high sum- mer, such as this, when a man need ask for nothing better than to be taken and kept out of doors ; but the thought of the farm- hand rising in a cheerless wintry dawn, putting on his foul and stiffened habiliments, setting out in a chilly drizzle to uproot a turnip field, row by row, with no one to talk to and nothing to look forward to but an evening in a tiny cot- tage-kitchen, full of noisy children no one could say that this was an ideal life, and he did not wonder that the young men flocked to the Country Life 265 towns, where there was at all events some stir, some amusement. That was the dark side of popular education, of easy communications, of newspapers, that it made men discontented with quiet life, without supplying them with intellectual resources. Yet with all its disadvantages and discom- forts, Hugh could not help feeling that thejife. of the country was more wholesome and natural f"or the^Tn^joTity^oFnierT, and he wished that the education given in country districts could be directed more to awakening an interest in country things, in trees and birds and flowers, and more, too, to increasing the resources of boys and girls, so that they could find amusing occupation for the long evenings of enforced leisure. The present system of education was directed, Hugh felt, more to training a gen- eration of clerks, than to implanting an aptitude for innocent recreation and sensible amuse- ment. People talked a good deal about tempting men back to the land, but did they not perceive that, to do that, it was necessary to make the agricultural life more attractive ? It was a mis- take that ran through the whole of modern education, that the system was invented by in- tellectual theorists and not by practical philoso- phers. The only real aim ought to be to teach people how to enjoy their work, by making 266 Beside Still Waters them efficient, and to enjoy their leisure by arousing the imagination. Hugh's musings led him on to wonder how it was possible to cultiva^p ^ sense of fr;}ppiness in people ; that was the darkest problem of all. Children had the secret of it ; they could amuse themselves under the most unpropitious cir- cumstances, and invent games of most surpass- ing interest out of the most grotesque materials. Then came the age when the sexual relations brought in a fierce and intenser joy ; but the romance of courtship and the early days of marriage once over, it seemed that most people settled down on very dull lines, and made such comfort as they could get the only object of their existence. What was it that thus tended to empty life of joy? Was it_the presence of anxiety, the failure of vitality, the dull condi- tions of monotonous labour undertaken for others' gain and not for one's self ? Looking back at his own life, Hugh could not discern that his routine work had ever deprived him of zest and interest. It was rather indeed the other way. The suspension of other interests that his life had involved, had sent him back with renewed delight to the occupations and interests of leisure ; he had been, he thought, perhaps unusually fortunate in receiving his liberty from mechanical work at a time when Sustained Happiness 267 his interests were active and his zest undimmed. But how was one to guard .trie-quality: oLjpy. how could it be stimulated and increased, if it began in the course of nature to flag? It was clear that life could not have for every one, nor at all times for any one, that quality of eager and active delight, that uplifting of the heart and mind alike, which sometimes surprised one, when one felt an intensity of gladness and grati- tude at being simply one's self, and at standing just at that point in life, surrounded and enriched by exactly the very things one most loved and desired the feeling that must have darted into Sinbad's mind when he saw that the very sand of the valley in which he lay consisted of pre- cious germs. Probably most people had some moments, oftenest perhaps in youth, of this full-flushed, cons^ious^jhapjnjess. And then again most people had considerable tracts of quiet contentment, times when their work pro- spered and their recreations amused. But how was one to meet the hours when one was neither happy nor contented ; when the mind flapped wearily like a loosened sail in a calm, when there was no savour in the banquet, when one went heavily ? It was of no use then to sum- mon joy to one's assistance, to call spirits from the vast deep, if they did not obey one's call. There ought, Hugh thought, to be a reserve of 268 Beside Still Waters sober piety and hopefulness on which one could draw in those dark days. There were no doubt mai^eojjiable and phlegmatic people who, as the old poet said, " Perfacile angustis tolerabant finibus aevum." (In narrow bounds an easy life endured.) But for those whose perceptions were keen, who lived upon joy, from the very constitution of their nature, how were such natures and he knew that he was of the number to avoid sinking into the mire of the Slough of De- spond, how were they to rejoice in the valley of humiliation ? What was to be their well in the vale of misery ? How were the pools to be filled with water? The answer seemed to be that it could jp_nly_ be achieved by work, by effort, by prayer. If i __^_^^__^ . i-nnruiiuii ifiimi/ .... JJilJTiin ~ one had definite work in hand, it carried one over these languid intervals. How often had the idea of setting to .work in these listless moods seemed intolerable ; yet how soon one forgot one's self in the exercise of congenial labour! Here came in the worth of effort, that one could force one's self to the task, com- mit one's self to the punctual discharge of an unwelcome duty. And if even that failed, then one could cast one's self into an inner re- Prayer 269 gion, in the spirit of the Psalmist, when he said, " Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it." One could fling one's prayer into the dark void, as the sailors from a sinking ship shoot a rocket with a rope attached to the land, and then, as they haul it in, feel with joy the rope strain tight, and know that it has found a hold. Hugh felt that such experience as this, ex- perience, that is, _ might be called a subjective experience, and could not be put to a scientific test. But for all that, there was nothing which of late years had so grown upon him as the consioiisjQSS~of the effectiveness of a certain kind of prayer. This was not a mechanical repetition of verbal forms, but a strong and secret uplifting of the heart to the Father of all. There were mo- ments when one seemed baffled and powerless, when one's own strength seemed utterly un- equal to the burden ; prayer on such occasions didjiqt necessarily bring a perfect serenity and joy, though there were times when it brought even that ; but it brought sufficient strength ; it made the difficult, the dreaded thing pos- sible. Hugh had proved this a hundred times over, and the marvel to him was that he did not use it more; but the listless_ .mind sqrne- tTmes~couT3 not brace itself.to the,, effort ; and then it seemed to Hugh that he was as one 270 Beside Still Waters who lay thirsting, with water in reach of his nerveless hand. Still there were few things of which he was so absolutely certain as he was of til-abo.unding strength of prayer : it seemed to reveal a dim form moving behind the veil of things, which in the moment of entreaty seemed to suspend its progress, to stop, to draw near, to smile. Why the gifts from that wise hand were often such difficult things, stones for bread, serpents for fish, Hugh could not divine. But he tended I, less, .and Jjess^to, ask for^grecise things, but to pray in the spirit of the old Dorian prayer that what was good might be given him, even if he did not perceive it to be good, and that what was evil might be withheld, even if he desired it. While he thus mused, walking swiftly, the day darkened about him, drawing the colour out of field and tree. The tides of the sky thickened, and set to a deep enamelled green, and a star came out above the tree-tops. Now and then he passed through currents of cool air that streamed out of the low wooded val- leys, rich with the fragrance of copse and dingle. An owl fluted sweetly in a little holt, and was answered by another far up the hill. He heard in the breeze, now loud, now low, the far-off motions of the wheels of some cart rumbling blithely homewards. All else was The Twilight 271 still. At last he came out on the top of the wolds ; the road stretched before him, a pale ribbon among dusky fields ; and the lights of the distant village pierced through the darker gloom of sheltering trees. Hugh seemed that night to walk with his unknown friend close beside him, answering his hopes, stilling his vague discontents with a pure and tender faith- fulness, that left him nothing to desire, but that the sweet nearness might not fail him. At such a moment, dear and wonderful as the world was, he felt that it held nothing so beau- tiful or so dear as that sweet companionship, and that if he had been bidden, in that instant, strong and content as he was, to enter the stream of death, a firm hand and a smiling face would have lifted him, as the stream grew shal- lower about him, safe and satisfied, up on the farther side. o. ~< XXVIII AMONG the most interesting of the new friends that Hugh made at Cambridge was a young Don who was understood to hold ad- vanced socialistic views. What was more im- portant from Hugh's point of view was that he was a singular frank, accessible, and lively per- son, full of ideas and enthusiasms. Hugh was at one time a good deal in his company, and at one time used to feel that the charm of conversation with him was, not that they dis- cussed things, or argued, or had common interests, but that it was like setting a sluice open between two pools ; their two minds, like moving waters, seemed to draw near, to inter- mingle, to linger in a subtle contract. His friend, Sheldon by name, was a great reader of J ' miuki -- books ; but he read, Hugh thought, in the same way that he himself read, not that he might master subjects, annex ,,a.nd .explore mental provinces, and classify the movement of thought, but rather that he might lean out into a misty haunted prospect, where mysterious groves 272 Democracy 273 concealed the windings of uncertain paths, and the turrets of guarded strongholds peered over the woodland. Hugh indeed guessed dimly that his friend had a whole range of interests of which he knew nothing, and this was confirmed by a conversation they had when they had walked one day together into the deep country. They took a road that seemed upon the map to lead to a secluded village, and then to lose itself among the fields, and soon came to the hamlet, a cluster of old-fashioned houses that stood very prettily on a low scarped gravel hill that pushed out into the fen. They betook themselves to the churchyard, where they found a little ancient conduit that gushed out at the foot of the hill. This they learned had once been a well much visited by pilgrims for its supposed healing qualities. It ran out of an arched recess into a shallow pool, fringed with sedge, and filled with white-flowered cresses and forget-me-not. Below their feet lay a great stretch of rich water-meadows, the wooded hills opposite looming dimly through the haze. Here they sat for a while, listening to the pleasant trickle of the spring, and the conversation turned on the life of villages, the lack of amuse- ment, the dulness of field labour, the steady drift of the young men to the towns. Hugh regretted this and said that he wished the country clergy 18 274 Beside Still Waters would try to counteract the tendency ; he spoke of village clubs and natural-history classes. Sheldon laughed quietly at his remarks, and said, " My dear Neville, it is quite refreshing to hear you talk. It is not for nothing that you bear the name of Neville ; you are a mediaeval aristocrat at heart. These opinions of yours v are as interesting as fossils in a bed of old blue clay. Such things are to be found, I believe, imbedded in the works of Ruskin and other patrons of the democracy. Why, you are like a man who sits in a comfortable first-class car- riage in a great express, complacently thinking that the money he has paid for his ticket is the motive force of the train ; you are trying to put out a conflagration with a bottle of eau-de- Cologne. The battle is lost, and the world is transforming itself, while you talk so airily. You and other leisurely people are tolerated, just as a cottager lets houseleek grow on his tiles ; but you are not part of the building, and if there is a suspicion that you are making the roof damp, you will have to be swept away. The democracy you want to form is making itself, and sooner or later you will have to join in the procession." Hugh laughed serenely at his companion's vehemence. " Oh," he said, " I am a mild sort of socialist myself; that is, I see that it is Democracy 275 coming, I believe in equality, and I don't question the rights of the democracy. But I don't pretend to like it, though I bow to it ; the democracy seems to me to threaten nearly all the things that are to me most beautiful the woodland chase, the old house among its gardens, the village church among its elms, the sedge-fringed pool, the wild moorland and all the pleasant varieties, too, of the human spirit, its fantastic perversities, its fastidious reveries, its lonely dreams. All these must go, of course ; they are luxuries to which no individual has any right ; we must be drilled and organised ; we must do our share of the work, and take our culture in a municipal gallery, or through cheap editions of the classics. No doubt we shall get the ' joys in the widest commonalty spread ' of which Wadsworth speaks ; and the only thing that I pray is that I may not be there to see it." " You are a fine specimen of the individualist," said Sheldon, " and I have no desire to convert you indeed we speak different languages, and I doubt if you could understand me ; there is to be no such levelling as you suppose, rather the other way indeed; we shall not be able to do without individualism, only it will be pleasantly organised. The delightful thing to me is to observe that you are willing to let us have a little of your culture at your own price, but we 276 Beside Still Waters shall not want it ; we shall have our own culture and it will be a much bigger and finer thing than the puling reveries of hedonists ; it will be like the sea, not like the scattered moor- land pools." " Do you mean," said Hugh, " when you talk so magniloquently of the culture of the future, that it will be different from the culture of the present and of the past?" "No, no," said Sheldon," not different at all, only wider and more free. Do you not see that at present it is an elegant monopoly, belonging to a few select persons, who have been refined and civilised up to a certain point? The diffi- culty is that we can't reach that point all at once why, it has taken you thirty or forty centuries to reach it ! and at present we can't get further than the municipal art-gallery, and lectures on the ethical outlook of Browning. But that is not what we are aiming at, and you are not to suppose that yours is a different ideal of beauty and sensibility from ours. What I object to is that you and your friends are so se- lect and so condescending. You seem to have no idea of the movement of humanity, the transformation of the race, the corporate rise of emotion." " No," said Hugh, " I have no idea what you are speaking of, and I confess it sounds to me Individualism 277 very dull. I have never been able to generalise. I find it easy enough to make friends with homely and simple people, but I think I have no idea of the larger scheme. I can only see the little bit of the pattern that I can hold in my hand. Every human being that I come to know appears to me strangely and appallingly distinct and untypical ; of course one finds that many of them adopt a common stock of con- ventional ideas, but when you get beneath that surface, the character seems to me solitary and aloof. When people use words like 'democracy' and ' humanity,' I feel that they are merely painting themslves large, magnifying and dig- nifying their own idiosyncrasies. It does not uplift and exalt me to feel that I am one of a class. It depresses and discourages me. I hug and cherish my own differences, my own identity. I don't want to suppress my own idio- syncrasies at all; and what is more, I do not think that the race ma "es progress that way. All the people who have really set their mark upon the world have been individualists. Not to travel far for instances, look at the teaching of our Saviour ; there is not a hint of patriotism, of the rights of society, of common effort, of the corporateness of which you speak. He spoke to the individual. He showed that if the indi- vidual could be simple, generous, kindly forgiv- 278 Beside Still Waters ing, the whole of society would rise into a region where organisation would be no longer needed. These results cannot be brought about by legis- lation ; the spirit must leap from heart to heart, as the flower seeds itself in the pasture." " Would you be surprised to hear," said Shel- don, smiling, " that I am in accordance with most of your views ? Of course legislation is not the end : it is only a way of dealing with refractory minorities. The highest individual freedom is what I aim at. But the mistake you make is in thinking that the individual effects anything; he is only the link in the chain. It is all a much larger tide, which is moving resist- lessly in the background. It is this movement that I watch with the deepest hope and concern. I do not profess to direct or regulate it, it is much too large a thing for that ; I merely de- sire to remove as far as I can the obstacles that hinder the incoming flood." " Well," said Hugh, smiling, " as long as you do not threaten my individual freedom, I do not very much care." "Ah," said Sheldon, " now you are talking like the worst kind of aristocrat, the early- Victorian Whig, the man who has a strong belief in popu- lar liberty, combined with an equally strong sense of personal superiority." " No, indeed ! " said Hugh, " I bow most sin- Corporateness 279 cerely before the rights of society. I only claim that as long as I do not interfere with other people, they will not interfere with me. I re- cognise to the full the duty of men to work, but when I have complied with that, I want to ap- proach the world in my own way. I am aware that reason tells me I am one of a vast class, and that I have certain limitations, but at the same time instinct tells me that I am sternly and severely isolated. No one and nothing can intrude into my mind and self ; and I feel in- clined to answer you like Dionysus in the Frogs of Aristophanes, who says to Hercules when he is being hectored, " Don't come pitching your tent in my mind, you have a house of your own ! " Secretum meum mihi, as St. Francis of Assisi said identity is the one thing of which I am absolutely sure. One must go on perceiv- ing, drawing in impressions, feeling, doubting, suffering; one knows that souls like one's own are moving in the mist ; and if one can discern any ray of light, any break in the clouds, one must shout one's loudest to one's comrades ; but you seem to me to want to silence my lonely experience by the vote of the majority, and the majority seems to me essentially a dull and tire- some thing. Of course this sounds to you the direst egotism ; but when one has labelled a thing egotistic, one has not necessarily con- 280 Beside Still Waters demned it, because the essence of the world is its egotism. You would no doubt say that we are no more alone than the leaves of a tree, that the sap which is in one leaf at one moment is the next moment in another, and that we are more linked than we know. I would give much to have that sense, but it is denied me, and mean- while the pressure of that corporate force of which you speak seems to me merely to menace my own liberty, which is to me both sacred and dear." Sheldon smiled. " Yes," he said, " we do indeed speak different languages. To me this sense of isolation of which you speak is merely a melancholy phantom. I rejoice to see one of a great company, and I exult when the sap of the great tree flows up into my own small veins; but do not think that I disapprove of your po- sition. I only feel that you are doing uncon- sciously the very thing that I desire you to do. But at the same time I think that you are miss- ing a great source of strength, seeing a thing from the outside instead of feeling it from the inside. Yet I think that is the way in which artists help the world, through the passionate realisation of themselves. But you must not think that you are carrying away your share of the spoil to your lonely tent. It belongs to all of us, even what you have yourself won." Materialism 281 Hugh felt that Sheldon probably was speak- ing the truth. He thought long and earnestly over his words. But the practical outcome of his reflections was that he realised the uselessness of trying to embrace an idea which one did not instinctively feel. He knew that his real life did not lie, at all events for the present, in move- ments and organisations. They were meaning- less words to him. His only conception of | relationships was the personal conception. He f desired with all his heart the uplifting, the i amelioration of human beings: he could contri- bute best, he thought, to that, by speaking out whatever he perceived and felt, to such a circle as was in sympathy with him. Sheldon, no doubt, was doing exactly the same thing ; there were multitudes of people in the world, who would agree with neither Sheldon nor himself, amiable materialists, whose only instinct was to compass their own prosperity and comfort, and who cared neither for humanity nor for beauty, except in so far as they ministered to their own convenience. Hugh did not sympathise with such people, and indeed he found it hard to conceive, if what philosophers and priests pre- dicated of the purpose of God was true, how such people came into being. The mistake, the gen- j erous mistake, that Sheldon made, was to think * that humanity was righting itself. It was per- 282 Beside Still Waters haps being righted, but ah, how slowly ! The error was to believe tha^ pnfi'f theories wprp the right ones. It was all far larger, vaster, more mysterious than that. Hugh knew that the ele- ment in nature and the world to which he him- self responded most eagerly was the element of beauty. The existence of beauty, the appeal it made to the human spirit, seemed to him the most hopeful thing in the world. But he could not be sure that the salvation of the world lay there. Meantime, while he felt the appeal, it was his duty to tell it out among the heathen, just as it was Sheldon's duty to preach the cor- porateness of humanity ; but Hugh believed that the truth lay with neither, but that both these instincts were but as hues of a prism, that went to the making up of the pure white light. They were rather disintegrations of some central truth, component elements of it rather than the truth itself. They were not in the least incon- sistent with each other, though they differed exceedingly ; and so he determined to follow his own path as faithfully as he could, and not in response to strident cries of justice and truth, and still less in deference to taunts of selfish- ness and epithets of shame, to lend a timorous hand to a work in the value of which he indeed sincerely believed, but which he did not believe to be his own work. The tide was indeed rolling Materialism 283 in, and the breakers plunging on the beach ; but so far as helping it on went, it seemed to him to matter little whether you sat and watched it with awe and amazement, with rapture and even with terror, or whether you ran to and fro, as Sheldon seemed to him to be doing, busying himself in digging little channels in the sand, that the roaring sea, with the wind at its back, might foam a little higher thus upon the shore. "*' XXIX THE morning sun fell brightly on Hugh's breakfast-table ; and a honeycomb that stood there, its little cells stored with translucent sweetness, fragrant with the pure breath of many flowers, sparkled with a golden light. Hugh fell to wondering over it. One's food, as a rule, transformed and dignified by art, and enclosed in vessels of metal and porcelain, had little that was simple or ancient about its asso- ciations ; how the world indeed was ransacked for one's pleasure! meats, herbs, spices, miner- als it was strange to think what a complexity of materials was gathered for one's delight ; but honey seemed to take one back into an old and savage world. Samson had gathered it from the lion's bones, Jonathan had thrust his staff into the comb, and put the bright oozings to his lips ; humanity in its most ancient and barbarous form had taken delight in this patiently manufactured confection. But a fur- ther thought came to him ; the philosopher spoke of a development in nature, a slow mov- 284 Bees 285 ing upward through painfully gathered experi- 1 ence. It was an attractive thought, no doubt, and gave a clue to the bewildering differences of the world. But after all how incredibly slow | a progress it was ! The whole course of history was minute enough, no doubt, in comparison with what had been ; but so far as the records of mankind existed, it was not possible to & trace that any great development had taken ? place. The lines of species that one saw to-day were just as distinct as they had been when the records of man began. They seemed to run, like separate threads out of the tapestry, complete and entire from end to end, not mix- ing or intermingling. Fish, birds, quadrupeds some had died out indeed, but no creature | mentioned in the earliest records showed the :] A smallest sign of approximating or drawing near ; to any other creature; no bird had lost its wings or gained its hands; no quadruped had deserted instinct for reason. Bees were a case in point. They were insects of a marvellous wisdom. They had a community, a govern- ment, almost laws. They knew their own business, and followed it with intense enthu- siasm. Yet in all the centuries during which they had been robbed and despoiled for the pleasure of man, they had learned no pru- dence or caution. They had not even learned 286 Beside Still Waters to rebel. Generation after generation, in fra- grant cottage gardens, they made their deli- (cious store, laying it up for their offspring. Year after year that store had been rifled ; yet | for all their curious wisdom, their subtle cal- Sculations, no suspicion ever seemed to have Centered their heads of what was going forward. |They did not even try to find a secret place in the woods for their nest ; they built obediently in the straw-thatched hives, and the same spoli- ation continued. A few days before, Hugh had visited a church in the neighbourhood, and had become aware of a loud humming in the chancel. He found that an immense swarm of bees had been hatched out in the roof, and were dying in hundreds, in their attempt to escape through the closed windows. There v, w *^ -*...,, were plenty of apertures in the church through | which they could have escaped, if they had I had any idea of exploration. But they were content to buzz feebly up and down the i panes, till strength failed them, and they i dropped down on to the sill among the ':; bodies of their brothers. An old man who | was digging in the churchyard told Hugh that the same thing had gone on in the church every summer for as long as he could remember. And yet one did not hesitate to accept the Man's Power 287 Darwinian theory, on the word of scientific men, though the whole of visible and recorded | experience seemed to contradict it. Even stranger than the amazing complexity of the whole scheme, was the incredible patience with which the matter was matured. What was more wonderful yet, man, by his power of observing the tendencies of nature, could make her laws to a certain extent serve his own ends. He could, for instance, by breeding carefully from short-legged sheep, in itself a fortuitous and unaccountable variation from the normal type, produce a species that should be unable * to leap fences which their long-legged ancestors could surmount ; he could thus save himself the ? trouble of erecting higher fences. This power in man, this faculty for rapid self-improvement, differentiated him from all the beasts of the field ; how had that faculty arisen ? It seemed a gap that no amount of development could bridge. If nature had all been perfect, if its rules had been absolutely invariable, if existence were conditioned by regular laws, it would be easy enough to believe in God. And yet as it was, it seemed so imperfect, and in some ways so unsatisfactory ; so fortuitous in certain re. spects, so wanting in prevision, so amazingly deliberate. Such an infinity of care seemed lavished on the delicate structure of the 288 Beside Still Waters smallest insects and plants, such a prodigal fancy ; and yet the laws that governed them seemed so strangely incomplete, like a patient, artistic, whimsical force, working on in spite of insuperable difficulties. It looked some- times like a conflict of minds, instead of one mind. And then, too, the wonder which one felt seemed to lead nowhere. It did not even lead t one to ascertain sure principles of conduct and life. The utmost prudence, the most careful attempt to follow the guidance of those natural laws, was liable to be rendered fruitless by what was called an accident. One's instinct to re- tain life, to grasp at happiness, was so strong ; and yet, again and again, one was taught that it was all on sufferance, and that one must count on nothing. One was set, it seemed, in a vast labryinth ; one must go forward, whether one would or no, among trackless paths, over- hung by innumerable perils. The only thing [ that seemed sure to Hugh was that the more ' one allowed the awe, the bewilderment, to pene- trate one's heart and mind, the more that one 8 I indulged a fearful curiosity as to the end and | purpose of it all, the nearer one came, if not to learning the lesson, yet at least towards reaching a state of preparedness that might fit one to receive the further confidence of God. Such A Patient Learner 289 tranquility as one gained by putting aside the problems which encompassed one, must be a hollow and vain tranquillity. One might indeed never learn the secret ; it might be the will of God simply to confront one with the desperate problem ; but a deep instinct in Hugh's heart told him that this could not be so ; and he determined that he, at all events, would go about the world as a patient learner, grasping at any hint that was offered him, whether it came by the waving of grasses on the waste, by the droop of flower-laden boughs over a wall, from the strange horned insect that crawled in the dust of the highway, or from the soft gaze of loving eyes, flashing a message into the depths of his soul. The pure faint lines of the wold that he saw from his window on the far horizon, rising so peacefully above the level pasture-land, with the hedgerow elms what did they stand for ? The mind reeled at the thought. They were nothing but a gigantic cemetery. Every inch of that sqft^ chalk had been made up by the life and death, through millions of years, of tiny insects, swimming, dying, mouldering in the depths of some shapeless sea. Surely such a thought had a message for his soul, not less real than the simpler and more direct mes- sage of peace that the soft pale outlines, the 290 Beside Still Waters gentle foldings of the hills, seemed to lend to his troubled spirit ; in such a moment his faith rose strong ; he trod a shining track through the deeps of God. XXX THE air that day was full of sunlight like fine gold, and put Hugh in mind of the city that was pure gold like unto clear glass ! he had often puzzled over that as a child ; gold always seemed so opaque a thing, a surface without depth ; but, after all, it was true of the air about him to-day clear and transparent indeed, with a perfect clarity and purity, and yet undoubted- ly all tinged and lucent liquid gold. He sat long on a bench in the college garden, a little paradise for the eye and mind ; it had been skilfully laid out, and Hugh used to think that he had never seen a place so enlarged by art, where so much ground went to the acre ! All the outer edge of it was encircled by trees elms, planes, and limes ; the borders, full of flowering shrubs, were laid out in graceful curves, and in the centre was a great oval bed of low-growing bushes, with the velvet turf all about it, sweeping in sunlit vistas to left and right. It gave somehow a sense of space and extent, achieved Hugh could 291 292 Beside Still Waters not guess how. To-day all the edges of the borders were full of flowers ; and as he wandered among them he was more than ever struck with a thought that had often come to him, the mystery of flowers ! The extraordi- nary variety of leaf and colour, the whimsical shapes, the astonishing invention displayed, and yet an invention of an almost childish kind. There was a clump of pink blooms, such as a child might have amused itself with cutting out of paper ; here rose tall spires, with sharp-cut, serrated leaves at the base, but the blue flowers on the stem were curiously lipped and horned, more like strange insects than flowers. And then the stainless freshness and delicacy of the texture, that a touch would soil ! These gracious things, uncurling themselves hour by hour, blooming, fading, in obedience to the strange instinct of life, surprised him by a sud- den thrill. Here was a bed of irises, with smooth blade-like stalks, snaky roots, the flowers of in- credible shapes, yet no two exactly alike, all splashed and dappled with the richest colours ; and then the mixture of blended fragrance ; the hot, honeyed smell of the candytuft, with aro- matic spicy scents of flowers that he could not name. Here again was the eschscholtzia, with its pointed horns, its bluish leaf, and the delicate orange petals, yet with a scent, pure but acid, Flowers 293 which almost made one shudder. There was some mind behind it all, Hugh felt, but what a mind ! how leisurely, how fanciful, how un- fathomable ! For whose pleasure were all these bright eccentric forms created ? Certainly not for the pleasure of man, for Hugh thought of the acres and acres of wheat now rising in serried t ranks in the deep country, with the poppies or \ the marigolds among them, all quietly unfold- f ing their bells of scarlet flame, their round, sun- / like faces, where no eye could see them, except j the birds that flew over. Could it be for *< God's own pleasure that these flower shapes were made? They could not even see each other, but rose in all their freshness, as by a subtle conspiracy, yet blind to the world about them, conscious only of the sunlight and the rain, with no imaginative knowledge > it would seem, or sympathy with their breth- ren. It always filled Hugh with a sort of pity to think of the sightless life of trees and flowers, each rising in its place, in plain, on hill, and yet each enclosed within itself, with no con- sciousness of its own beauty, and still less I conscious of the beauty of its fellows. And what was the life that animated them ? Where did it come from ? Where did it pass to ? Had they any sense of joy, of sorrow ? It was hard to believe that they had not. It always dis- 294 Beside Still Waters ..tressed Hugh to see flowers gathered or boughs broken ; it seemed a hateful tyranny to treat these delicate creatures so for an hour's pleasure. The sjght of flowers picked and then thrown carelessly down by the roadside, gave him a sense of helpless indignation. The idyllic picture of children wandering in spring, filling their hands with flower-heads torn from bank and copse, appeared to Hugh as only painful. Man, from first to last, seemed to spread a ruth- less destruction around him. Hugh's windows overlooked a stream-bend much frequented by fishermen ; and it was a misery to see the poor dace, that had lived so cool and merry a life in *!*.*/ . the dark pools of the stream, poising and dart. ing among the river-weed, hauled up struggling to the air, to be greeted with a shout of triumph, and passed about, dying and tortured, among the hot hands, in the thin choking air. Was that what God made them for? What com- pejnsation awaited them for so horrible and shameful an end. Hugh felt with a sigh that the mystery was almost unendurable, that God shouM make, hour by hour, these curious and exquisite things, such as flowers and fishes, and thrust them, not into a world where they could live out a peace- * ful and innocent life, but into the midst of dangers and miseries. Sometimes, beneath his Pain and Suffering 295 windows, he could see a shoal of little fish flick from the water in all directions at the rush of a pike, one of them no doubt horribly engulfed in the monster's jaws. Why was so hard a price to be paid for the delightful privilege of life ? Was it indifference or carelessness, as a child might make a toy and weary of it? It seemed like it, though Hugh could not bear to think that it was so ; and yet for thousands of centuries the same thing had been going on all over the world, and no one seemed an inch nearer to the mystery of it all. How such thoughts seemed to shrivel into nothing the voluble religious systems that professed to explain it all ! The misery of it was that, here and everywhere, God seemed to be explaining it Himself every day and hour, and yet one missed the connection which could make it all intelligible the connection, that is, between God, as man in his heart conceived of Him, and God as He wrote Himself large in every field and wood. On what hypothesis of pure benevolence and perfect justice could all these restless lives, so full of pain and suffering, and all alike ending in death and disappearance, be explained ? Yet, stranger still, the mystery did not make him exactly unhappy. The fresh breeze blew through the trees, the flowers blazed and shone 296 Beside Still Waters in the steady sun, the intricate lawns lay shim- mering among the shubberies, and Hugh seemed full of a baffling and baffled joy. At that mo- ment, at all events, God wished him well, and spread for him the exquisite pageant of life and colour and scent ; the very sunshine stole like some liquid essence along his veins, and filled him with unreasoning happiness. And yet he too was encompassed by a thousand dangers ; there were a hundred avenues of sense, of emo- tion, by which some dark messenger might steal upon him. Perhaps he lurked behind the trees of that sweet paradise, biding his time to come forth. But to-day it seemed a species of treachery to feel that anything but active love and perfect benevolence was behind these smil- ing flowers, those tall trees rippling in the breeze, that lucent sky. To-day at least it seemed God's will that he should be filled with peaceful content and gratitude. He would drink the cup of sweetness to-day without re- trospect or misgiving. Would the memory of that sweetness stay his heart, and sustain his soul when the dark days came, when the garden should be bare and dishevelled, and a strange dying smell should hang about the walks ; and when perhaps his own soul should be sorrowful even unto death? XXXI THE perception of one of the great truths of personality came upon Hugh in a summer day which he had spent, according to his growing inclination, almost alone. In the morning he had done some business, some writing, and had read a little. It was a week when Cambridge was almost wholly given up to festivity, and the little river that flowed beneath his house echoed all day long Jo the wasfi of boats, the stroke of oars, and the cheerful talk of happy people. Trie streets were full of gaily-dressed persons hurrying to and fro. This background of brisk life pleased Hugh exceedingly, so long as he was not compelled to take any part in it, so long as he could pursue his own reveries. Part of the joy was that he could peep at it from his secure retreat ; it inspirited him vaguely, setting, as it were, a cheerful descant to the soft melody of his own thoughts. In the afternoon he went out leisurely into the country ; it was pleasant < to leave the humming town, so full of active f life and merry gossip, and to find that in the 297 298 Beside Still Waters country everything was going forward as though there were no pressure, no bustle anywhere. The solitary figures of men hoeing weeds in among the growing wheat, and moving imperceptibly across the wide green fields, pleased him. He wound away through comfortable villages, among elms and orchards, choosing the by-ways rather than the high-roads, and plunging deeper and deeper into country which it seemed that no one ever visited except on rustic business. There was a gentle south wind which rippled in the trees; the foliage had just begun to wear its late burnished look, and the meadows were full of high-seeded grass, gilded or silvered with buttercups and ox-eye daisies. He stopped for a time to explore a little rustic church, that stood, in a careless mouldering dignity, in the centre of a small village. Here, with his gentle fondness for little omens, he be- came aware that some good thing was being pre- pared for him, for in the nave of the church, under the eaves, he noted no less than three swarms of bees, that had made their nest under the timbers of the roof, and were just awakening into summer activity. The drones were being cast out of the hives, and in an angle formed by the buttress of the church, Hugh found a small lead cistern of water, which was a curious sight ; it was all full of struggling bees fallen from the A Man of Science 299 roof above, either solitary bees who had darted into the surface, and could not extricate them- selves, or dcan.es. with a .working, bee grappled, intent on pinching the life out of the poor be- wildered creature, the day of whose reckoning had come. Hugh spent a long time in pulling the creatures out and setting them in the sun, till at last he was warned by slanting shadows that the evening was approaching, and he set off upon his homeward way. In a village near Cambridge he encountered a friend, a bluff man of science, who was engaged in a singular investigation. He kept a large variety of fowls, and tried experiments in cross- br_ee.eling, noting carefully in a register the plum- age and physical characteristics of the chickens. He had hired for the purpose a pleasant house, with a few paddocks attached, where he kept his poultry. He invited Hugh to come in, who in his leisurely mood gladly assented. The great man took him round his netted runs, and discoursed easily upon the principles that he was elucidating. He spoke with a mild enthus- iasm; and it surprised and pleased Hugh that a man of force and gravity should spend many hours of every day in registering facts about the legs, the wattles, and the feathers of chickens, and speak so gravely of the prospect of infinite in- terest that opened before him. He said that he 300 Beside Still Waters had worked thus for some years, and as yet felt himself only on the fringe of the subject. They walked about the big garden, where the evening sun lay pleasantly on turf and borders of old-fashioned flowers ; and with the compla- cent delight with which a scientific man likes to show experiments to persons who are engaged in childish pursuits such as literature, the philo- sopher pointed out some other curiosities, as a plant with a striped flower, whose stalk was covered with small red protuberances, full of a volatile and aromatic oil, which, when a lighted match was applied to them, sent off a little airy .flame with a dry and agreeable fragrance, as the tiny ignited cells threw out their inflammable perfume. Hugh was pleasantly entertained by these sights, and went home in a very blithe frame of mind ; a little later he sat down to write in his own cool study. He was working at a task of writing which he had undertaken, when a thought darted suddenly into his mind, sug- gested by the image of the man of science who had beguiled an afternoon hour for him. It was a complicated thought at first, but it grew clearer. He perceived, as in a vision, humanity moving onwards to some unseen goal. He took account, as from a great height, of all those who are in the forefront of thought and Prophets 301 intellectual movement. He saw them working soberly and patiently in their appointed lines. He discerned that though all these persons im- agined that they had purposely taken up some form of intellectual labour, and were pursuing it with a definite end in view, they had really no choice in the matter, but were being led along certain ways by as sure and faithful an instinct as the bees that he had seen that day intent on their murderous business. Each of these savants, in whatever line his labours lay, felt that he was striding forward on a quest pro- posed, as he imagined, by himself. But Hugh saw, with an inward certainty of vision, that the current which moved them was one with which they could not interfere, and that it was but the inner movement of some larger and wider mind which propelled them. He saw too, that many of his friends, men of practical learning, who were occupied, with a deep sense of im- portance and concern, in accumulating a little treasure of facts and inferences, in science, in history, in language, in philosophy, were but led by an inner instinct, an implanted taste, along the paths they supposed themselves to be choosing and laboriously pursuing. They en- couraged each other at intervals by the bestowal of little honours and dignities; but at this mo- ment Hugh saw them as mere toilers; like the 302 Beside Still Waters merchants who spend busy and unattractive lives, sitting in noisy offices, acquiring money with which to found a family, with the curious ambition that descendants of their own, whom they could never see, should lead a pleasant life in stately country-houses, intent upon shooting and games, on social gatherings and petty business. He saw clearly that the mer- chant and the philosopher alike had no clear idea of what they desired to effect, but merely followed a path prepared and indicated. And then he saw that the minds which were really in the forefront of all were the poetical minds, ^HgBlMMMBaM the interpreters; the prophets, who saw, not in minute detail, and in smalldefinite sections, but with a wide and large view, whither all this dis- covery, this investigation, was tending. The investigation worthless and minute enough in itself, as it seemed to be when examined at a single point, had at least this value, that some principle, some inspiration for life could be ex- tracted from it, something which would perme- ate slowly the thought of the world, set pulses beating, kindle generous visions, and teach men ultimately the lesson that once learnt, puts life into a different plane, the lesson that God is behind and over and in all things, and that it is His purpose and not our own that is growing and ripening. A Tranquil Faith 303 This mighty truth came home to Hugh that quiet afternoon with a luminous certitude, a vast increase of hopelessness such as he had seldom experienced before. But the thought in its infinite width narrowed itself like a great stream that passes through a tiny sluice ; and Hugh saw what his own life was to be ; that he O .-. ->" "^^'-..v.ir.->.|,M tww ^J*~.l -imnl f ' must no longer form plans and schemes, battle with uncongenial conditions, make foolish and fretful efforts in directions in which he had no real strength or force ; but that his only vocation must lie in faithfully and *ttmm*m*r4piij.tii!i*,<:- ' jgffff^ ,,.,.* simply interpreting to himself and others this gigantic truth : the truth, namely, that no one wnflfltS^3W. ji^jgggJM'!**'*- ""** * >< ought ever to indulge in gloomy doubts and questionings about what his work in the world was to be, but that men and women alike ought just to advance, quietly and joyfully, upon the path so surely, so inevitably indicated to them. The more, he saw, that one listens to this inner voice, the more securely does the prospect open ; by labour, not by fretful performance of dis- agreeable duty, but by eager obedience to the constraining impulse, is the march of the world accomplished. For some the path is quiet and joyful, for some it is noisy and busy, for some it is dreary and painful ; for some it is even what we call selfish, cruel and vile. But we must advance along it whether we will or no. 304 Beside Still Waters And it became clear to Hugh that the more simply and clearly we feel this, the more will all the darker elements of life drop away from the souls of men ; for the darker elements, the delays, the sorrows, the errors, are in vast measure the shadows that come from our be- lieving that it is we who cause and originate, that our efforts and energies are valuable and useful. They are both, when God is behind them ; but when we strive to make them our own, their pettiness and insignificance are revealed. It must not be said that Hugh never fell from this deep apprehension of the truth. There were hours when he was haunted by the spectres of his own unregenerate action, when he regretted mistakes, when he searched for occupation ; but he grew to see that even these sad hours only brought out for him, with deep- er and clearer significance, the essential truth of the vision, which did indeed transform his life. When he was ill, anxious, overwrought, he grew to feel that he was being held quietly back for a season ; and it led to a certain deliberate disentangling of himself from the lesser human relations, from a consciousness that his appointed work was not here, but that he was set apart and consecrated for a particular work, the work of apprehending and discerning, Trustfulness 305 of interpreting and expressing, the vast design of life ; it represented itself to him in an image of children wandering in fields and meadows, just observing the detail and the petty connec- tion of objects, the hedgerow, the stream appearing in certain familiar places, by ford or bridge, the trees that loomed high over the nearer orchard, and seemed part of it. And then one of these children, he thought, might, on a day of surprises, be taken up to the belfry of the old church-tower in the village, and out :ipon the roof. Then in a moment the plan, the design of all would be made clear, the hid- den connection revealed. Those great tower- ing elms, that rose in soft masses above the orchard, were in reality nothing but the elms that the child knew so well from the other side, that overhung his own familiar garden. There, among the willows, the stream passed from ford to bridge, and on again, circling in loops and curves. The village would be a different place after that, not known by an empirical experi- ence, but apprehended as a construction, as a settled design, where each field and garden had its appointed place. And so Hugh, with a great effort of utter resignation, a resignation which had something passionate and eager about it, cast himself into the Father's hands, and prayed that he might 306 Beside Still Waters no longer do anything but discern and follow the path that was prepared for him. Long and late these thoughts haunted him ; but when he went at last through the silent house to his own room, it was with a sense that he was reposing in perfect trustfulness upon the will of One who, whether He led him forward or held him back, knew with a deep and loving tenderness one thing that he, and he only, could do in the great complicated world. That world was now hushed in sleep. But the weir rushed and plunged in the night outside ; and over the dark trees that fringed the stream there was a tender and patient light, that stole up from the rim of the whirling globe, as it turned its weary sides, with punctual obedience, to the burning light of the remote sun. XXXII HUGH found that, as he grew older, he M"MSto*s^V~'^ : *'* t \ tended to read less, or rather that he tended -. ......^SOBOiUnur t,.tnnif^-- * to recur more and more to the familiar books. "I'li'i'l" ^....v^^Y-"*""' 1 **'' 1 * 1 *" He had always been a rapid reader, and had followed the line of pure pleasure, rather than pursued any scheme of self-improvement. He became aware, particularly at Cambridge, that he was by no means a well-informed man, and that his mind was very incompletely furnished. He was disposed to blame his education for this, to a certain extent ; it had been almost purely classical ; he had been taught a little science, a little mathematics, and a little French ; but the only history he had done at school had been ancient history, to illustrate the classical au- thors he had been reading ; and the result had been a want of mental balance ; he knew nothing of the modern world or the movement of European history ; the whole education had in fact been linguistic and literary ; it had sac- rificed everything to accuracy, and to the con- sideration of niceties of expression. It might 307 308 Beside Still Waters have been urged that this was in itself a train- ing in the art of verbal expression ; but here it seemed to Hugh that the whole of the train- ing had confined itself to the momentary effect, the ring of sentences, the adjustment of epi- thets, and that he had received no sort of train- ing in the art of structure. He had never been made to write essays or to arrange his materials. He thought that he ought to have been taught how to deal with a subject ; but his exercises had been almost wholly translations from an- cient classical languages. He had been taught, in fact, how to manipulate texture, but never how to frame a design. The result upon his reading had been that he had always been in search of phrases, of elegant turns of expression and qualification, but he had never learned how to apprehend the ideas of an author. He had not cared to do this for himself, and from the examination point of view it had been simply a waste of time. All that he had ever tried to do had been so to familiarise himself with the style, the idiosyncrasies of authors, that he might be able to reproduce such superficial ef- fects in his compositions, or to disentangle a passage set for translation. He had not arrived at any real mastery of either Greek or Latin, and it seemed to him, reflecting on this process long afterwards, that the system had en- Classical Education 39 \\ couraged in him a naturally faulty and dilet- tante bent in literature. In reading, for instance, * a dialogue of Plato, he had never cared to l < follow the argument, but only to take pleas ure in beautiful, isolated thoughts and images; in reading a play of Sophocles, he had cared little about the character-drawing or the devel- opment of the dramatic situation ; he had only striven to discover and recollect extracts of gnomic quality, sonorous flights of rhetoric, illustrative similes. The same tendency had affected all his own reading, which had lain mostly in the direction of belles-lettres and literary annals ; and, in the course of his official life, literature had been to him more a beloved recreation than a matter of mental discipline. The result had been that he found himself, in the days of his emancipation, with a strong perception of literary quality, and a wide knowledge of poetical and imaginative literature ; he had, too, a considerable acquaint- ance with the lives of authors ; and this was all. He could read French with facility, but with little appreciation of style. Both German and Italian were practically unknown to him. Hugh made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship, of a young Fellow of a neigh- bouring college, whose education had been con- ducted on entirely different lines. This young 310 Beside Still Waters man had been educated privately, his health making it impossible for him to go to school. He had read only just enough of classics to en- able him to pass the requisite examinations, and he had been trained chiefly in history and modern languages. He had taken high honours in history at Cambridge, and had settled down as a historical lecturer. As this friendship in- creased, and as Hugh saw more and more of his friend's mind, he began to realise his own deficiencies. His friend had an extraordinary grasp of political and social movements. He was acquainted with the progress of philosophy and with the development of ideas. It was a brilliant, active, well-equipped intellect, moving easily and with striking lucidity in the regions of accurate knowledge. Sometimes, in talking to his friend, Hugh became painfully aware of the weakness of his own slouching, pleasure- loving mind. It seemed to him that, in the in- tellectual region, he was like a dusty and ragged tramp, permeated on sunshiny days with a sort of weak, unsystematic contentment, dawdling by hedge-row ends and fountain-heads, lying in a vacant muse in grassy dingles, and sleeping by stealth in the fragrant shadow of hay-ricks ; while his friend seemed to him to be a brisk gentleman in a furred coat, flashing along the roads in a motor-car, full of useful activity and Mental Discipline 311 pleasant business. His friend's idea of educa- tion was of a strict and severe mental discipline ; he did not over-estimate the value of know- ledge, but regarded facts and dates rather as a skilled workman regards his bright and well- arranged tools. What he did above all things value was a keen, acute, clear, penetrating mind, which arrayed almost unconsciously the ele- ments of a problem, and hastened unerringly to a conclusion. The only point in which Hugh rated his own capacity higher, was in a certain relish for literary effect. His friend was a great reader, but Hugh felt that he himself possessed a power of enjoyment, an appreciation of colour and melody, a thrilled delight in what was artistically ex- cellent, of which his friend seemed to have little inkling. His friend could classify authors, and could give off-hand a brilliant and well-sustained judgment on their place in literary develop- ment, which fairly astonished Hugh. But the difference seemed to be that his friend had mastered books with a sort of gymnastic agil- ity, and that his mind had reached an aston- ishing degree of technical perfection thereby ; but Hugh felt that to himself books had been a species of food, and that his heart and spirit had gained some intensity from them, some 3i2 Beside Still Waters secret nourishment, which his friend had to a certain extent missed. Hugh had been so stirred on several occa- sions by a sense of shame at realising the impotence and bareness of his own mind, that jhe laid down an ambitious scheme of self-im- provement, and attacked, hjstory with a^zeatous desire for his own mental reform. But he soon discovered that it was useless. Such an -effort might have been made earlier in life, before habits had been formed of desultory enjoyment, but it was in vain now. He real- ised that accurate knowledge simply fell through his mind like a shower of sand ; a little of it lodged on inaccessible ledges, but most of it was spilled in the void. He saw that his only hope was to strengthen and enlarge his exist- ing preferences, and that the best that he could hope to arrive at was to classify and systema- tise such knowledge as he at present possessed. It was too late to take a new departure, or to aim at any completeness of view. The mental discipline that he required, and of which he "BMMMHMOMn^ felt an urgent need, must be attained by a diligent sorting of his own mental stores, hap- hazard and disjointed as they were. And after all, he felt, there was room in the world for many kinds of minds. Mental discipline from the academical point of view was a very import- Mental Fertilisation 313 ant thing, perhaps the thing that the ordinary type of public schoolboy was most in need of. But there was another province too, the pro- vince of mental appreciation, and it was in this field that Hugh felt himself competent to labour. It seemed to him that there were many young men at the university, capable of intellectual pleasure, who had been starved by the at once diffuse and dignified curriculum of classical education. Hugh felt that he him- self had been endowed with an excess of the imaginative and artistic quality, and that, owing to natural instincts and intellectual home-surroundings, he had struck out a path for himself: books had been to Hugh from his . & earliest years cnaririets of communication with other minds. He could not help doubting whether they ever developed qualities or de- lights that did not naturally exist in a rudi- mentary form in the mind which fell under their influences. He could not, in looking back, trace the originating power of any book w on his own mind ; the ideas of others had rather acted in fertilising the germs which lay dormant in his own heart. They had deep- ened the channels of his own thoughts, they had revealed him to himself; but there had always been, he thought, an unconscious power of selection at work ; so that uncongenial ideas, 314 Beside Still Waters unresponsive thoughts, had merely danced off the surface without affecting any lodgment. He had gained in taste and discrimination, but he could not trace any impulse from literature which had set him exploring a totally unfamil- iar region. Sometimes he had resolutely sub- mitted his mind to the leadership of a new author ; but he had always known in his heart that the pilgrimage would be in vain. He felt that he would have gained if he had known this more decisively, and if he had spent his energies more faithfully in pursuing what was essentially congenial to him. There were cej[taia,,aw.thQrs, certain poets who, he had instinctively felt from the outset, viewed life, nature, and art from the same standpoint as himself. His mistake had been in not defining that standpoint more clearly, but in wandering vaguely about, seeking for a guide, for way-posts, for beaten tracks. What he ought to have done was to have fixed his eyes upon the goal, and fared directly thither. But this misdirected attempt, over which he wasted some precious months, to enlarge the horizon of his mind, had one valuable effect. It revealed to him at last what the object of his search was. He become aware that he was vowed to the pursuit of beauty, of a definite and almost lyrical kind. He saw that his mind Poetry 3*5 was not made to take in, with a broad and vig- orous sweep, the movement of human en- deavour; he saw that he had no conception of wide social or political forces, of the development of communities, of philosophical ideals. These were great and high things, and his studies gave him an increased sense of their greatness and significance. But Hugh saw that he could neither be a historian nor a philosopher, but that his work must be of an individualistic type. He saw that the side of the world which appealed to himself was the subtle and myste- rious essence of beauty the beauty of nature, of art, of music, of comradeship, of relations with other souls. The generalisations of science had often a great poetical suggestiveness ; but he had no vestige of the scientific temper which is content to deduce principles from patient and laborious investigation. He saw that his own concern must be with the emo- tions and the hearts of his fellows, rather than with their minds ; that if he possessed any qualities at all, they were of a poetical kind. The mystery of the world was profound and dark, though Hugh could see that science was patiently evolving some order out of the chaos. But the knowledge of the intricate scheme was but a far-off vision, an august hope; and mean- while men had to meet life as they could, to 316 Beside Still Waters evolve enough hopefulness, enough inspiration from their complicated conditions to enable them to live a full and vigorous life. Poetry, to give a large name to the various interpretations of subtle beauty, could offer in some measure that hope, that serenity ; could lend the dignity to life which scientific in- vestigations tended to sweep away. Science seemed to reveal the absolute pettiness, the minute insignificance of all created things, to show how inconsiderable a space each separate ndividual occupied in the sum of forces; the thought weighed heavily upon Hugh that he was only as the tiniest of the drops of water in a vast cataract that had rushed for thousands of years to the sea ; it was a paralysing concep- tion. It was true that the water-drop had a definite place ; yet it was the outcome and the victim of monstrous forces ; it leaped from the mountain to the river, it ran from the river to the sea ; it was spun into cloud-wreaths; it fell on the mountain-top again ; it was perhaps con- gealed for centuries in some glacier-bed ; then it was free again to pursue its restless progress. But to feel that one was like that, was an un- utterably dreary and fatiguing thought. The weary soul perhaps was hurried thus from zone to zone of life, never satisfied, never tranquil ; with a deep instinct for freedom and tran- The August Soul 317 quillity, yet never tranquil or free. Then, into this hopeless and helpless prospect, came the august message of poetry, revealing the tran- scendent dignity, the solitariness, the majesty of the indomitable soul ; bidding one remember that though one was a humble atom in a vast scheme, yet one had the sharp dividing sense of individuality; that each individual was to himself the measure of all things, a fortress of personality ; that one was not merely whirled about in a mechanical order ; but that each man was as God Himself, able to weigh and survey the outside scheme of things, to approve and to disapprove; and that the human will was a mysterious stronghold, impregnable, se- cure, into which not even God Himself could intrude unsummoned. How small a thing to the eye of the scientist were the human pas- sions and designs, the promptings of instinct and nature ; but to the eye of the poet how sublime and august ! These tiny creatures could be dominated by emotions love, honour, patriotism, liberty which could enable them, frail and impotent as they were, to rise ma- jestically above the darkest and saddest limita- tions of immortality. They could be racked with pain, crushed, tormented, silenced ; but nothing could make them submit, nothing could force them to believe that their pains 318 Beside Still Waters were just. Herein lay the exceeding dignity of the human soul, that it could arraign its Creator before its own judgment-seat, and could condemn Him there. It could not, it seemed, refuse to be called into being, but, once exist- ent, it could obey or not as it chose. Its joys might be clouded, its hopes shattered, but it need not acquiesce ; and this power of rebellion, of criticism, of questioning, seemed to Hugh one of the most astonishing and solemn things in the world. And thus to Hugh the history of the individual, the aspirations and longings of mankind, seemed to contain a significance, a sanctity that nothing could remove. He did not believe that this rebellious ques- tioning was justified, but this did not lessen his astonishment at the fact that the human soul could claim a right to decide, by its own in- tuitions, what was just and what was unjust, and could accuse the Eternal Lord of Life of not showing it enough of the problem for it to be able to acquiesce in the design, as it desired to do. Hugh believed that he was justified in holding that as Love was the strongest power in the world, the Creator and Inspirer of that love probably represented that quality in the supremest degree, though this was an inference only, and not supported by all the phenomena of things. But it seemed to him the one clue The Secret of a Star 3 J 9 through the darkness ; and this secret hope was perhaps the highest and best thought that came to him from searching the records of humanity and the conceptions of mortal minds. And therefore Hugh felt that he was on the side of the individual ; and that he touched life in that relation. Literature then must be for him, in some form or other, an attempt to quicken the individual pulse, to augment the in- dividual sense of significance. He must abstain from what was probably a higher work; but he must not lose faith thereby. He must set him- self with all his might to preach a gospel of beauty to minds which, like his own, were in- capable of the larger mental sweep, and could only hope to disentangle the essence of the mo- ment, to refine the personal sensation. That was the noble task of high literature, of art, of music, of the contemplation of nature, that it could give the mind a sense of largeness, of dim and wistful hope, of ultimate possibilities. The star that hung in the silent heaven it was true that it was the creation of mighty forces, that it had a place, a system, a centrifugal energy, a radiation of its own. That was in a sense the message of a star ; but it had a further appeal, too, to the imaginative mind, in that it hung a glowing point of ageless light, infinitely remote, intolerably mysterious, a symbol of all 320 Beside Still Waters the lustrous energies of the aspiring soul. And in one sense, indeed, the pure imagination could invest such vast creatures of God with even a finer, freer charm than scientific apprehension. Science could indicate its bulk, its motions, its distance, even analyse its very bones ; but it could do no more ; while the spirit could glide, as in an aerial chariot, through the darkness of the impalpable abyss, draw nearer and nearer in thought to the vast luminary, see unscathed its prodigious vents spouting flame and smoke, and hear the roar of its furnaces ; or softly alight upon fields of dark stones, and watch with awe the imagined progress of forms intolerably huge, swollen as with the bigness of nightmare.. Here was the strange contrast, that science was all on fire to learn the truth ; while the incomprehen- sible essence of the soul, with its limitless vis- ions, was capable of forming conceptions which the truth should disappoint. And here again came in a strange temptation. If life and iden- tity were to be indefinitely prolonged, then Hugh had no wish but to draw nearer to the truth, however hard and even unpalatable it might be ; but if, on the other hand, this life were all, then it seemed that one might be even the happier for comfortable and generous delusions. Hugh, then, felt that if the old division of Idealistic and Scientific 321 more highly developed minds was the true one ; if one was either Aristotelian or Platonist, that is to say, if one's tendencies were either scien- tific or idealistic, there was no doubt on which side of the fight he was arrayed ; not that he thought of the two tendencies as antagonistic; and if indeed, the scientific mind tended to con- temn the idealistic mind, as concerning itself with fancies rather than with facts, he felt that there could not be a greater mistake than for the idealistic mind to contemn the scientific. Rather, he thought, the idealists should use the scientific toilers as patient, humble, and service- able people, much as the Dorian conquerors of Sparta used the Helots, and encouraged them to perform the necessary and faithful work of in. vestigation for which the idealists were unfitted. The mistake which men of scientific temper made, Hugh thought, was to concern them- selves only or mainly, with material phenomena. The idealistic and imaginative tendencies of man were just as much realities, and no amount of materialism could obliterate them. What was best of all was to import if possible a scien- tific temper into idealistic matters ; not to draw hasty or insecure generalisations, nor to neglect phenomena however humble. Books, then, for Hugh were, in their largest aspect, indications and manifestations of the idealistic nature of 322 Beside Still Waters man. The interest about them was the perceiv- ing of the different angles at which a thought struck various minds, the infusion of personality into them by individuals, the various interpre- tations which they put upon perceptions, the insight into various kinds of beauty and hope- fulness which the writers displayed. And thus Hugh turned more and more away from the critical apprehension of imaginative literature to the mystical apprehension of it. A critical apprehension of it was indeed neces- sary, for it initiated one into the secrets of expression and of structure, in which the force of personality was largely displayed, taking shape from the thought in them, as clothes take shape from their wearers. But deeper still lay the mystical interpretation. In the world of books he heard the voice of the soul, sometimes lamenting in desolate places, sometimes singing blithely to itself, as a shepherd sings upon a headland, in sight of the blue sea ; sometimes there came a thrill of rapture into the voice, when the spirit was filled to the brim with the unclouded joys of the opening world, the scent of flowers, the whispering of foliage in great woods, the sweet harmonies of musical chords, the glance of beloved eyes, or the accents of some desired voice ; and then again all this would fade and pale, and the soul would sit The End of Reading 323 wearied out, lamenting its vanished dreams and the delicate delights of the springtime, in some wild valley overhung with dark mountains, un- der the dreadful and inscrutable eye of God. Life, how insupportable, how beautiful it seemed ! Full of treasures and terrors alike, its joys and its woes alike unutterable. The strangest thing of all : that the mind of man was capable of seeing that there was a secret, a mystery about it all ; could desire so passionately to know it and to be satisfied, and yet forbidden even dimly to discern its essence. What, after all, Hugh reflected, was thejejjd of reading? Not erudition nor information. though many people seemed to think that this was a meritorious object. Professed historians must indeed endeavour to accumulate facts, and to arrive if possible at a true estimate of ten- dencies and motives ; the time had not yet come, said the most philosophical historians, for any deductions to be drawn as to the de- velopment of the mind of the world, the slow increase of knowledge and civilisation ; and yet that was the only ultimate value of their work, to attempt, namely, to arrive at the complex causes and influences that determined the course of history and progress. Hugh felt in- stinctively that his mind, impatient, inaccurate, subtle rather than profound, was ill adapted for 324 Beside Still Waters such work as this. He felt that it was rather his work to arrive, if he could, at a semi-poet- J ical, semi-philosophical intrepretation of life, and to express this as frankly as he could. And thus reading must be for him an attempt to refine and quicken his insight into the human mind, working in the more delicate regions of art. He must study expression and personality; he must keep his spirit sensitive to any hint of truth or beauty, any generous and ardent intui- tion, any grace and seemliness of thought. He atas-innd of .bgflfe of r travel, as opening to him a larger perspective of human life, and reveal- ing to him the conclusions to which experience and life had brought men of other nationali- ties and other creeds. Biography was his most beloyedl, study? because it opened out to him the vast complexity of human motive ; but he thought that its chief value had been in revealing to him the extraordinary part that conventional and adopted beliefs and motives played in the majority of lives. HJsjrjgajj^n.g, then, began to have for him a djjypj3$d_special significance. He was no philo- sopher ; he found that the metaphysical region, where one stumbled among the dim ultimate causes of things, only gave him a sense of insecurity and despair ; but he was in a sense a psychologist ; his experience of life had taught Sweet Voices 325 him to have an inkling of the influences that affect character, and still more of the stubborn power of character in resisting influences. Poet- ry was to him a region in which one became aware of strange and almost magical forces, which came floating out of unknown and mys- terious depths it was a world of half-heard echoes, momentary glimpses, mysterious ap- peals. In history and in biography one saw more of the interacting forces of temperament ; but in poetry, as the interpreter of nature, one found one's self among cries and thrills which seemed to rise from the inner heart of the world. It was the same with religion ; but here the forces at work so often lost their delicacy and subtlety by being compounded with grosser human influences, entangled with superstitions, made to serve low and pitiful ends. In poetry there was none of this it was the most disin- terested thing in the world. In the pure medium of words, coloured by beauty and desire, all the remote, holy, sweet secrets of the heart were blended into a rising strain ; and it was well to submit one's self, tranquilly and with an open heart, to the calling of these sweet voices. Hugh was aware that his view was not what would be called a practical one ; that he had no fibre of his being that responded to what were called civic claims, political urgencies, social 326 Beside Still Waters reforms, definite organisations; he felt increas- ingly that these things were but the cheerful efforts of well-meaning and hard-headed persons to deal with the bewildering problems, the un- satisfactory debris of life. Hugh felt that the only possible hope of regeneration and uprais- ing lay in the individual ; and that if the tone of individual feeling could be purified and strengthened, these organisations would become mere unmeaning words. The things that they represented seemed to Hugh unreal and even contemptible, the shadows cast on the mist by the evil selfishnesses, the stupid appetites, the material hopes of men. As simplicity of life and thought became more and more dear to him, he began to recognise that, though there was no doubt room in the world, as it was, for these other busy and fertile ideas, yet that his own work did not lie there. Rather it lay in defining and classifying his own life and experi- ence ; in searching for indubitable motives, and noble possibilities that had almost the force of certainties ; of gathering up the secrets of ex- istence, and speaking them as frankly, as ardent- ly, as melodiously as his powers would admit, if by any means he might awaken other hearts to the truths which had for him so sweet and con- straining an influence. XXXIII AN art which had for Hugh an almost divine quality was the art of jnu^sic ; an art dependent upon such frail natural causes, the vibration of string and metal, yet upon the wings of which the soul could fly abroad further than upon the wings of any other art. There was a little vig- nette of Bewick's, which he had loved as a child, where a minute figure sits in a tiny horned and winged car, in mid-air, throwing out with a free gesture the reins attached to the bodies of a flight of cranes; the only sym- bol of his destination a crescent moon, shining in dark skies beyond him. That picture had always seemed to Hugh a parable of music, that it gave one power to fly upon the regions of the upper air, to use the wings of the morning. And yet, if one analysed it, what a totally inexplicable pleasure it was. Part of it, the orderly and rhymthical beat of metre, such as comes from striking the fingers on the table, or tapping the foot upon the floor ; how deep lay the instinct to bring into strict se- 327 328 Beside Still Waters quence, where it was possible, the mechanical movements of nature, the creaking of the boughs of trees, the drip of water from a foun- tain-lip, the beat of rolling wheels, the recurrent song of the thrush on the high tree; and then there came the finer sense of intricate vibration. The lower notes of great organ-pipes had little indeed but a harsh roar, that throbbed in the leaded casements of the church ; but climbing upwards they took shape in the delicate noises, the sounds and sweet airs of which Prospero's magic isle was full. And yet the rapture of it was inexpressible in words. Sometimes those airy flights of notes seemed to stimulate in some incomprehensible way the deepest emotions of the human spirit ; not indeed the intellectual and moral emotions, but the primal and ele- mental desires and woes of the heart. Hugh could hardly say in what region of the soul this all took place. It seemed indeed the purest of all emotions, for the mind lost itself in a delight which hardly even seemed to be sensuous at all, because in the case of other arts, one was conscious of pleasure, conscious of perception, of mingling identity with the thing seen or perceived ; but in music one was rapt almost out of mortality, in a kind of bodiless joy. One of Hugh's causes of dissatisfaction with Music 329 the education he had received was that, though he had a considerable musical gift, he had never been taught to play any musical instrument. Partly indolence and partly lack of opportunity had prevented him from attaining any measure of skill by his own exertions, though he had once worked a little, very fitfully, at the theory of music, and had obtained just enough know- ledge of the composition of chords to give him an intelligent pleasure in disentangling the ele- ments of simple progressions. Another trifling physical characteristic had prevented his hear- ing as much music as he would have wished. The presence of a crowd, the heat and glare of concert-rooms, the uncomfortable proximity of unsympathetic or possibly loquacious persons, combined with a dislike of fixed engagements outside of the pressure of official hours of work, had kept him, very foolishly, from musical per- formances. Thus almost the only music with which he had a solid acquaintance was ecclesiasti- cal music ; he had been accustomed as a boy to frequent the cathedral services in the town where he was at school ; and in London he con- stantly went on Sundays to St. Paul's or West- minster. It was no doubt the stately mise-en- scene of these splendid buildings that affected Hugh as much even as the music itself, though the music was like the soul's voice speaking 330 Beside Still Waters gently from beautiful lips. Hugh always, if he could, approached St. Paul's by a narrow lane among tall houses, that came out opposite the north transept. At a certain place the grey dome became visible, strangely foreshortened, like a bleak mountain-head, and then there ap- peared, framed by the house-fronts, the sculp- tured figure of the ancient lawgiver, with a gesture at once vehement and dignified, that crowded the top of the pediment. Then fol- lowed the hush of the mighty church, the dumb falling of many foot-falls upon the floor, the great space of the dome, in which the mist seemed to float, the liberal curves, the firm pro- portions of arch and pillar ; the fallen daylight seemed to swim and filter down, stained with the tincture of dim hues; the sounds of the busy city came faintly there, a rich murmur of life ; then the soft hum of the solemn bell was heard, in its vaulted cupola; and then the organ awoke, climbing from the depth of the bour- don ; the movement of priestly figures, the ./sweet order of the scene, the sense of high solemnity, made a shrine for the holy spirit of beauty to utter its silvery voice. In West- minster it was different ; the richer darkness, the soaring arches, the closer span, the incredible treasure of association and memory made it a more mysterious place, but the sound lacked the Church Music 331 smothered remoteness that gave such a strange, repressed economy to the music of St. Paul's. At Westminster it was more cheerful, more tangible, more material. But the tranquillising, the inspiring effect upon the spirit was the same. Perhaps it was not technical religion of which Hugh was in search. But it was the relig- ion which was as high above doctrine and creed and theology as the stars were above the clouds. The high and holy spirit inhabiting eternity seemed to emerge from the metaphysic, the science of religion, from argument and strife and dogma, as the moon wades, clear and cold, out of the rack of dusky vapours. Such a voice, as that gentle, tender, melancholy, and still joyful voice, that speaks in the iigth Psalm, telling of misunderstanding and persecution, and yet dwelling in a further region of peace, came speeding into the very labyrinth of Hugh's troubled heart. " I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost ; O seek Thy servant, for I do not forget Thy commandments." It was not inspiration, not a high-hearted energy, that music brought with it ; it was rather a recon- ciliation of all that hurt or jarred the soul, an earnest of intended peace. But, after all, this was not music pure and simple ; it was music set in a rich frame of both sensuous and spiritual emotions. Hugh 33 2 Beside Still Waters realised that music had never played a large part in his life, but had been one of many artis- tic emotions that had spoken to him in divers manners. There was one fact about music which lessened its effect upon Hugh, and that was the fact that it seemed to depend more than v other arts upon what one brought to it. In cer- tain moods, particularly melancholy moods, when the spirit was fevered by dissatisfaction or sor- row, its appeal was irresistible ; it came flying out of the silence, like an angel bearing a vial of fragrant blessings. It came flooding in, like the cool brine over scorched sands, smoothing, refreshing, purifying. There seemed some- thing direct, authentic, and divine about the message of music in such moods ; there seemed no interfusion of human personality to distract, because the medium was more pure. Sometimes, for weeks together at Cambridge, Hugh wouldgo without hearing any music at all, until an almost physical thirst would fall upon him. In such an arid mood, he would find him- self tyrannously affected by any chance frag- ment of music wafted past him ; he would go to some cheerful party, where, after the meal was over, a piano would be opened, and a sim- ple song sung or a short piece played. This would come like a draught of water to a weary traveller, bearing Hugh away out of his sur- Musicians 333 foundings, away from gossip and lively talk, into a remote and sheltered place ; it was like opening a casement from a familiar and lighted room, and leaning out over a dim land, where the sunset was slowly dying across the rim of the tired world. Hugh always found it easy to make friends with musicians. They generally seemed to him to be almost a race apart ; their art seemed to withdraw them in a curious way from the world, and to absorb into itself the intellectual vigour which was as a rule, with ordinary men, distribu- ted over a variety of interests. He knew some musicians who were men of wide cultivation, but they were very much the exception ; as a rule, they seemed to Hugh to be a simple, and almost childlike species, fond of laughter and elemen- tary jests, with emotions rather superficial than deep, and not regarding life from the ordinary- standpoint at all. The reason lay, Hugh be- lieved, in the nature of the medium in which they worked ; the writer and the artist were brought into direct contact with humanity ; it was their business to interpret life, to investi- gate emotion ; but the musician was engaged with an art that was almost mathematical in its purity and isolation ; he worked under the strict- est law, and though it required a severe and strong intellectual grip, it was not a process 334 Beside Still Waters which had any connection with emotions or .with life. But Hugh always felt himself to be inside the charmed circle, and though he knew but little of the art, musical talk always had a deep interest for him, and he seemed to divine and understand more than he could explain or express. But still it was true that music had played no part in his intellectual development ; he had never approached it on that side ; it had merely ministered to him at intervals a species of emo- tional stimulus ; it had seemed to him to speak a language, dim and unintelligible, but the pur- port of which he interpreted to be somehow high and solemn. There seemed indeed to be nothing in the world that spoke in such myste- rious terms of an august destiny awaiting the soul. The origin, the very elements of the joy of music were so absolutely inexplicable. There seemed to be no assignable cause for the fact that the mixture of rhythmical progress and natural vibration should have such a singular and magical power over the human soul, and affect it with such indescribable emotion. He had sometimes seen, half with amusement, half with a far deeper interest, the physical ef- fect which the music of some itinerant piano- organ would produce upon street children ; they seemed affected by some curious intoxication ; The Organ 335 their gestures, their smiles, their self-conscious glances, their dancing movements, so unnatural in a sense, and yet so instinctive, made the process appear almost magical in its effects. Though it did not affect him so personally, it seemed to have a similarly intoxicating effect on Hugh's own mind. Even if the particular piece that he was listening to had no appeal to his spirit, even if it were only a series of lively cascades of tripping notes, his thoughts, he found, took on an excited, an irrepressible tinge. But if, on the other hand, the time and the mood were favourable, if the piece were solemn or mournful, or of a melting sweetness, it seemed for a moment to bring a sense of true values into life, to make him feel, by a silent inspiration, the Tightness and the perfection of the scheme of the world. One evening a friend of Hugh's, who was or- ganist of one of the important college chapels, took him and a couple of friends into the build- ing. It had been a breathlessly hot summer day, but the air inside had a coolness and peace which revived the languid frame. It was nearly dark, but the great windows smouldered with deep fiery stains, and showed here and there a pale face, or the outline of a mysterious form, or an intricacy of twined tabernacle-work. Only a taper or two were lit in the shadowy 336 Beside Still Waters choir ; and a light in the organ-loft sent strange shadows, a waving hand or a gigantic arm, across the roof, while the quiet movements of the player were heard from time to time, the pas- sage of his feet across the gallery, or the rustling of the leaves of a book. Hugh and his friends seated themselves in the stalls ; and then for an hour the great organ uttered its voice now a soft and delicate strain, a lonely flute or a lan- guid reed outlining itself upon the movement of the accompaniment ; or at intervals the sym- phony worked up to a triumphant outburst, the trumpets crashing upon the air, and a sudden thunder outrolling ; the great pedals seeming to move, like men walking in darkness, treading warily and firmly ; until the whole ended with a soft slow movement of perfect simplicity and tender sweetness, like the happy dying of a very old and honourable person, who has drunk his fill of life and blessings, and closes his eyes for very weariness and gladness, upon labour and praise alike. The only shadow of this beautiful hour was that injjiis jrapt space of tranquil reflection one seemed to have harmonised and explainecTlIfe, joy, and disaster alike, to have wound up a clue, to have brought it all to a peaceful and perfect climax of silence, like a tale that is told ; and then it was necessary to go out to the world False Asceticism 337 again with all its bitterness, its weariness, and its dissatisfaction till one almost wondered whether it was wise or brave to have chased and captured this strange phantom of imagined peace. Yes, it was wise sometimes, Hugh felt sure! to have refused it would have been like refus- ing to drink from a cool and bubbling way- side spring, as one fared on a hot noon over the shimmering mountain-side refused, in a spirit of false austerity, for fear that one would thirst again through the dreary leagues ahead. As long as one remembered that it was but an imagined peace, that one had not attained it, it was yet well to remember that the peace was real, that it existed somewhere, even though it was still shut within the heart of God. How- ever slow the present progress, however long the road, it was possible to look forward in hope, to know that one would move more blithely and firmly when the time should come for the de- sired peace to be given one more abundantly ; it helped one, as one stumbled and lingered, to look a little further on and to say, "I will run the way of Thy commandments, when Thou hast set my heart at liberty." XXXIV HUGH'S professional life had given him little opportunity for indulging artistic tastes. He had been very fond as a boy of sketching, especially architecturaTsubjects ; it had trained his powers of observation ; but there had come a time when, as a young man, he had deliber- ately laid his sketching aside. The idea in his mind had been that if one desired to excel in any form of artistic expression, one must de- vote all one's artistic faculty to that. He had been conscious of a certain diffuseness of taste, a love of music and a love of pictorial art being both strong factors in his mind ; but he was also dimly conscious that he matured slowly ; that he had none of the facile grasp of difficult things which characterised some of his more able companions ; his progress was always slow, and he arrived at mastery through a long wrestling with inaccuracy and half knowledge ; his perception was quick, but his grasp feeble, while his capacity for forgetting and losing his hold on things was great. He 338 Pictorial Art 339 therefore made a deliberate choice in the mat- ter, guided, he now felt, rather by a kind of intuition than by any very definite principle, and determined to restrict his artistic energies to a single form of art. His father, he remem- bered, had remonstrated with him, and had said that by giving up sketching he was sacrificing a great resource of recreation and amusement. He had no answer at the time to the criticism, but it seemed to him that he knew his own mind in the matter, and that as he could not hope, he thought, to attain to any real excel- lence in draughtsmanship, it had better be cut off altogether, and his energies, such as they were he knew that the spring was not a copious one confined to a more definite channel. As life went on, and as time became more and more precious, as his literary work more and more absorbed him, he drew away from the artistic region ; in his early years of manhood he had travelled a good deal, and the seeing of pictures had always been part of the pro- gramme ; but his work became heavier, and the holidays had tended more and more to be spent in some quiet English retreat, where he could satisfy his delight in nature, and re-read some of the old beloved books. A certain physical indolence was also a factor, an indolence which 340 Beside Still Waters made wandering in a picture-gallery always rather a penance ; but he contrived at intervals to go and look at pictures in London in a lei- surely way, both old and new ; and he had one or two friends who possessed fine works of art, which could be enjoyed calmly and quietly. He was aware that he was losing some catholi- city of mind by this but he knew his limita- tions, and more and more became aware that his constitutional energy was not very great, and needed to be husbanded. He was quite aware that he was not what would be called a cultivated person, that his knowledge both of art and music was feeble and amateurish ; but he saw, or thought he saw, that people of wide cultivation often sacrificed in intensity what they gained in width; and as he became gradually aware that the strongest faculty he possessed was the literary faculty, he saw that he could not hope to nourish it without a certain renun- ciation. He had no taste for becoming an expert or a connoisseur ; he had not the slighest wish to instruct other people, or to arrive at a technical and professional knowledge of art. He was content to leave it to be a rare luxury, a thing which, when the opportunity and the mood harmonised, could open a door for him into a beautiful world of dreams. He was quite aware that he often liked what would be called Hand and Soul 341 the wrong things ; but what he was on the look- out for in art was not technical perfection or finished skill, but a certain indefinable poet- ical suggestion, which pictures could give him, when they came before him in certain moods. The mood, indeed, mattered more than the picture ; moreover it was one of the strangest things about pictorial art, that the work of cer- tain artists seemed able to convey poetical sug- gestion, even when the poetical quality seemed to be absent from their own souls. He knew a certain great artist well, who seemed to Hugh to be an essentially materialistic man, fond of sport and society, of money, and the pleasures that money could buy, who spoke of poetical emotion as moonshine, and seemed frankly bored by any attempt at the mystical apprehen- sion of beautiful things, who could yet produce, by means of his mastery of the craft, pictures full of the tenderest and loveliest emotion and poetry. Hugh tried hard to discern this quality in the man's soul, tried to believe that it was there, and that it was deliberately disguised by a pose of bluff unaffectedness. But he came to the conclusion that it was not there, and that the painter achieved his results only by being able to represent with incredible fidelity the things in nature that held the poetical quality. On the other hand he had a friend of real poet- 342 Beside Still Waters ical genius, who was also an artist, but who could only produce the stiffest and hardest works of art, that had no quality about them except the quality of tiresome definiteness. This was a great mystery to Hugh ; but it ended eventually, after a serious endeavour to appre- ciate what was approved by the general verdict to be of supreme artistic value, in making him resolve that he would just follow his own inde- pendent taste, and discern whatever quality of beauty he could, in such art as made an appeal to him. Thus he was not even an eclectic ; he was a mere amateur; he treated art just as a possible vehicle of the poetical suggestion, and allowed it to speak to him when and where it could and would. He had moreover a great suspicion of con- ventionality in taste. A man of accredited taste often seemed to him little more than a man who had the faculty of admiring what it was the fashion to admire. Hugh had been for a short time under the influence of Ruskin, and had tried sincerely to see the magnificence of Turner, and to loathe the artificiality of Claude Lorraine. But when he arrived at his more independent attitude, he found that there was much to admire in Claude; that exquisite golden atmosphere, syffusing a whole picture with an evening glow, enriching the lavish fore- Turner 343 ground, and touching into romantic beauty headland after headland, that ran out, covered with delicate woodland, into the tranquil lake ; those ruinous temples with a quiet flight of birds about them ; the mysterious figures of men emerging from the woods on the edges of the water, bent serenely on some simple busi- ness, had the magical charm ; and then those faint mountains closing the horizon, all rounded with the golden haze of evening, seemed to hold, in their faintly indicated heights and folds, a delicate peace, a calm repose, as though glad just to be, just to wait in that reposeful hour for the quiet blessing of waning light, the sober content so richly shed abroad. It was not criticism, Hugh thought, to say that it was all impossibly combined, falsely conceived. It was not, perhaps, a transcript of any one place or one hour ; but it had an inner truth for all that ; it had the spirit of evening with its pleasant weariness, its gentle recollection, its waiting for repose ; or it had again the fresh- ness of the morning, the vital hope that makes it delightful to rise, to cast off sleep, to go abroad, making light of the toil and heat that the day is to bring. And then, in studying Turner, he learned to see that, lying intermingled~winr~all the power and nobility of much of his work, there was a 344 Beside Still Waters displeasing extravagance, a violence, a faulti- ness of detail, an exaggeration that often ruined his pictures. Neither he nor Claude were true to life ; but there was an insolence sometimes about Turner's variation from fact, which made him shudder. How he seemed sometimes, in his pictures of places familiar to Hugh such, for instance, as the drawing of Malham Cove to miss, by his heady violence, all the real, the essential charm of the place. Nature was not what Turner depicted it ; and he did not even develop and heighten its beauty, but substi- tuted for the real charm an almost grotesque personal mannerism. Turner's idea of nature seemed to Hugh often purely theatrical and melo-dramatic, wanting in restraint, in repose. The appeal of Turner seemed to him to be constantly an appeal to childish and unpercep- tive minds, that could not notice a thing unless it was forced upon them. Some of the earlier pictures indeed, such as that of the frost-bound lane, with the boy blowing on his fingers, and the horses nibbling at the stiff grass, with the cold light of the winter's dawn coming slowly up beyond the leafless hedge, seemed to him to be perfectly beautiful ; but the Turner of the later period, the Turner so wildly upheld by Ruskin, seemed to Hugh to have lost sight of nature, in the pleasure of constructing extravagant and Pictures with a Message 345 fantastic schemes of colour. The true art seemed to Hugh not to be the art that trumpets beauty aloud, and that drags a spectator rough- ly to admire ; but the art that waits quietly for the sincere nature-lover, and gives a soft hint to which the soul of the spectator can add its own emotion. To Hugh it was much a matter of mood. He would go to a gallery of ancient or modern art, and find that there many pictures had no message or voice for him ; and then some inconspicuous picture would sudden- ly appeal to him with a mysterious force the pathetic glance of childish eyes, or an old face worn by toil and transfigured by some inner light of hopefulness ; or a woodland scene, tree-trunks rising amid a copse ; or the dark water of a sea- cave, lapping, translucent and gem-like, round rock ledges ; or a reedy pool, with the chimneys of an old house rising among the elms hard by ; in a moment the mood would come upon him, and he would feel that a door had been opened for his spirit into a place of sweet imaginings, of wistful peace, bringing to him a hope of something that might assuredly be, some deep haven of God where the soul might float upon a golden tide. One day, for instance, two old line-engravings of Italian pictures which he had inherited, and which hung in his little library, gave him this sense ; he had known them ever 34 6 Beside Still Waters since he was a child, and they had never spoken to him before. Had they hung all these years patiently waiting for that moment ? One was The Betrothal of the Virgin, by Raphael, where the old bearded priest in his tiara, with his robes girt precisely about him, casts an in- quiring look on the pair, as Joseph, a worn, majestic figure, puts the ring on the Virgin's finger. Some of it was hard and formal enough ; the flowers on Joseph's rod might have been made of china; the slim figure of the disap- pointed suitor, breaking his staff, had an unpleas- ingtrimness ; and the companions of the Virgin were models of feeble serenity. But the great new octagonal temple in the background, an empty place it seemed for the open doors gave a glimpse of shadowy ranges the shallow steps, the stone volutes, the low hills behind, with the towered villa even the beggars beg- ging of the richly dressed persons on the new- laid pavement all these had a sudden appeal for him. The other picture was the Communion of Jerome, by Domenichino a stiff, conven- tional design enough. The cherubs hanging in air might have been made of wax or even metal there was no aerial quality about them they cumbered the place ! But the wistful look of the old worn saint, kneeling so faintly, so Secrets of Art 347 wearily, the pure lines of the shrine, the wax- lights, the stiff robes of the priest, the open arch showing an odd, clustered, castellated house, rising on its steep rocks among dark brushwood, with a glimmering pool below, and mysterious persons drawing near it all had a tyrannical effect on Hugh's mind. Probably a conventional critic would have spoken approv- ingly of the Raphael and disdainfully enough of the Domenichino but the point to Hugh was not in the art revealed, but in the associa- tion, the remoteness, the suggestiveness of the pictures. The faults of each were patent to him ; but something in that moment shone through ; one looked through a half-open door, and saw some beautiful mystery being cele- brated within, something that one could not explain or analyse, but which was none the less certainly there. Thus art became to Hugh, like nature, an echoing world that lay all about him, which could suddenly become all alive with constrain- ing desire and joy. There was a scientific ap- prehension of both nature and art possible, no doubt. The very science that lay behind art had a suggestiveness of its own ; that again had its own times for appeal. But Hugh felt that here again he must realise his limitations, and that life, to be real, must be a constant re- 348 Beside Still Waters sisting of diffuse wanderings in knowledge and perception. That his own medium was the medium of words, and that his task was to discern their colour and weight, their signifi- cance, whether alone or in combination ; that he must be able to upraise the jointed fabric of thought, like a framework of slim rods of firm metal, not meant to be seen or even realised by the reader, but which, when draped with the rich tapestry of words, would lend shape and strong coherence to the whole. All other art must simply minister light and fragrance; it might be studied, indeed, but easily and super- ficially ; not that it would not be better, per- haps, if he could have approached other arts with penetrating insight ; but that he felt that for himself, with his limitations, his feebleness, his faltering grasp, nothing must come between him and his literary preoccupation. The other arts might feed his soul indeed, but he could not serve them. He found that he took great delight, and was always at ease, in the company of musicians and painters, because he could understand and interpret their point of view, their attitude of mind ; while, on the other hand, he could approach them with the humility, the perceptive humility, which the artist desires as an atmosphere ; he did not know enough about the technical points to controvert and differ, Secrets of Art 349 while he knew enough to feel inspired by the tense feeling of secrets, understood and prac- tised, which were yet hidden from ordinary eyes. Art, then, and music became for Hugh as a sweet and remote illustration of his own consecration and indeed there were moments when, wearied by his own strenuous toil, plough- ing sadly through the dreary sands of labour, that must close at intervals round the feet of the serious craftsman, the sight of a picture hanging perhaps in a room full of cheerful com- pany, or the sound of music a few bars rippling from an open window, or stealing in faint gusts from the buttressed window of a church lighted for even song came to him like a sacred cup, carried in the hovering hands of a ministering angel, revealing to him the delicate hidden joy of beauty of which he had almost lost sight in his painful hurrying to some appointed end. Hinc lucem et pocula sacra, said the old motto of Cambridge. The light was clear enough, and led him forward, as it led the pilgrim of old, shining across a very wide field. But the holy refreshment that was tendered him upon the way, this was the blessed gift of those other arts which he dared not to follow, but which he knew held within themselves secrets as dear as the art which in his loneliness he pursued. XXXV HUGH had found himself one evening in the Combination-room of his college, in a little group of Dons who were discussing with great subtlety and ardour the question of retaining Greek in the entrance examinations of the uni- versity. It seemed to Hugh that the argu- ments employed must be identical with those that might formerly have been used to justify the retention of Hebrew in the curriculum the advisability of making acquaintance at first hand with a noble literature, the mental discipline to be obtained ; " Greek has such a noble grammar ! " said one of these enthusiasts. Hugh grew a little nettled at the tone of the discussion. The defenders of Greek seemed to be so impervious to facts which told against them. They erected their theories, like um- brellas, over their heads, and experience pat- tered harmlessly on the top. Hugh advanced his own case as an instance of the failure, of the melancholy results of a classical curriculum. It was deplorable, he said, that he should have 350 Artistic Susceptibility 35 1 realised, as he did when he left the university, that his real education had then to begin. He had found himself totally ignorant of modern languages and modern history, of science, and indeed of all the ideas with which the modern world was teeming. The chief defender of Greek told him blithely that he was indulging the utilitarian heresy; that the object of his education had been to harden and perfect his mind, so as to make it an instrument capable of subtle appreciation and ardent self-improve- ment. When Hugh pleaded the case of the immense numbers of boys who, after they had been similarly perfected and hardened, had been left, not only ignorant of what they had been supposed to be acquiring, but with- out the slightest interest in or appreciation of intellectual or artistic ideas at all, he was told that, bad as their case was, it would have been still worse if they had not been subjected to the refining process. Hugh, contrary to his wont, indulged in a somewhat vehement tirade against the neglect of the appreciative and artistic faculties in the case of the victims of a classical education. He maintained that the theory of mental discipline was a false one altogether, and that boys ought to be prepared on the one hand for practical life, and on the other initiated into mental culture. He com- 35 2 Beside Still Waters pared the mental condition of a robust English boy, his sturdy disbelief in intellectual things, with the case of a young Athenian, who was, if we could trust Plato, naturally and sponta- neously interested in thoughts and ideas, sensi- tive to beautiful impressions, delicate, subtle, intelligent, and not less bodily active. He went on to carry the war into the enemy's country, and to attack the theory of mental discipline altogether, which he maintained was the same thing as to train agricultural labourers in high- jumping and sprinting, or like trying to put a razor-edge on a hoe. What he said was neg- lected altogether was the cultivation of artistic susceptibility. In nature, in art, in literature, he maintained, lay an immense possibility of refined and simple pleasure, which was never cultivated at all. The mental discipline, he argued, which average boys received, was doubly futile, because it neither equipped them for practical life nor opened to them any vista of intellectual or artistic pleasure. What he himself desired to do was, on the one hand, to equip boys for practical life, and on the other to initiate them into the possibilities of in- tellectual recreation. The ordinary boy, he thought, was turned out with a profound dis- belief in intellectual things, and a no less profound belief in games as the only source of Artistic Susceptibility 353 rational pleasure. His own belief was that a great many English boys had the germs of simple artistic pleasures dormant in their spirits, and that they might be encouraged to believe in books, in art, in music, as sources of tranquil enjoyment, instead of regarding them as slightly unwholesome and affected tastes. He was aware that his views were being regarded as dangerously heterodox, and as tainted indeed with a kind of aesthetic languor. He felt that he was appearing to pose as the champion, not only of an unpopular cause, but of an essentially effeminate system. His oppon- ents were certainly not effeminate ; but they were masculine only in the sense in which the soldier is masculine, in his sturdy contempt for the arts of peace ; whereas to Hugh the soldier was only an inevitable excrescence on the com- munity, a disagreeable necessity which would disappear in the light of a rational and humane civilisation. A young Don, a friend of Hugh's, who had taken part in the discussion, a few days after, in the course of a walk, attacked Hugh on the subject. Hugh was aware that he defended himself very indifferently at the time ; but some remarks of his friend, who was a brisk and practical young man with a caustic wit, rankled in Hugh's mind. His friend had said 23 354 Beside Still Waters that the danger of Hugh's scheme was that it tended to produce people of the Maudle and Postlethwaite type, who made life into a mere pursuit of artistic impressions and sensations. " The fact is, Neville," he said, " that you up- held Epicureanism pure and simple; or, if you x dislike the word because of its associations, you taught a mere Neo-Cyrenaicism. You may say that the kind of pleasure you defended is a refined and intellectual sort of pleasure, but for all that it tends to produce men who withdraw from practical life into a mild hedonism ; you would develop a coterie of amiable, secluded persons, fastidious and delicate, indifferent citi- zens, individualistic and self-absorbed ; the train- ing of character retires into the background ; and the meal that you press upon us is a meal of exquisite sauces, but without meat. Fortu- nately," his friend added, " the necessity of earning a living keeps most people from drifting into a life of this kind. It is only consistent with comfortable private means." These phrases stuck in Hugh's memory with a painful insistence. He felt as if he had been rolled among thorns. He determined to think the matter carefully out. Was he himself drift- ing into a species of my^sticaljie.don ism ? It was very far from his purpose to do that. He de- termined that he would prepare a little apologia An Apologia 355 on the subject, to send to his friend ; and this was what he eventually despatched : " Your conversation with me the other day gave me a good deal to think about. What you said_ practically amounted to a charge of hedonism. Of course much depends upon the way m wfitck the word is applied, because I suppose that the large majority o men are hedonists, in the sense tJiat theypursue as far as possible their own V pleasure. But the particular kind of hedonism of which you spoke, Epicureanism , bears the sense of a certain degree of malingering. It im- plies TTTat the person who pursiiesthe course which I indicated is for some reason or other shirking his duty in the world. It is against this that I wish to defend myself ; I would say in tJie first place that what I was recommending was a very different sort of thing. I was rather attacking a certain sheepishncss of character V which seems to me to be the danger of our present education. The practical ideal held up before boys at our public schools is that they should be virtuous and industrious ; and that after they have satisfied both these claims, they should amuse themselves in what is held to be a manly they should fill their vacant hours with open-air exercise and talk about games ; a little light reading is not objected to ; but it is tacitly 35 6 Beside Still Waters assumed that to be interested in ideas, in litera- ture, art, and music is rather a dilettante business. I was reminded of a -memorable conver- sation I once had with a man of some note, a great landowner and prominent politician. He ^vas talking confidentially to me about his sons and their professions. One of the boys mani- fested a really remarkable artistic gift ; he was a draughtsman of extraordinary skill, and I said something about his taking up art seriously. The great man said that it would never do. ' I con- sider it almost a misfortune, ' he added, ' that the boy is so clever an artist, because it would be out of the question for him, in his position, to take up what is, after all, ratJier a disreputable profession. I have talked to him seriously about it, and I have said that there is no harm in his amusing himself in that way ; but he must have a serious occupation! " That is a very fair instance of the way in which the pursuit of art is regarded among our solid classes as distinctly a trade for an adven- turer. It will be a long time before we alter that. But the truth is that this kind of conven- tionalism, is what makes us so stupid a nation. We have no sort of taste for simplicity in life. A man who lived in a cottage, occupied in quiet and intellectual pursuits, would be held to be a failure, even if he lived in innocent happiness An Educative Process 357 to the age of eighty. My own firm belief is that this is all wrong. It opens up all sorts of obscure aud bewildering questions as to why we are sent into the world at all ; but my idea is that we are meant to be happy if we can, and that a great many people miss happiness, because they have not the courage to pursue it in their own way. I cannot believe myself that the compli- cated creature, so frail of frame, so limitless in dreams and hopes, is the result of a vortex. I cannot believe that we can be created except by a poiver that in a certain degree resembles our- selves. If we have remote dreams of love and liberty, of justice and truth, I believe that those ideas must exist in a sublime degree in the mind of our Maker. I believe, on the whole, though there are many difficulties in the way of the theory, that life is meant for 'most of us to be an educative process ; that we are meant to quit the world wiser, nobler, more patient than we en- tered it ; why the whole business is so intolerably slow, why we are so hampered by traditions and instincts that retard the process, I cannot con- ceive ; but my belief is that we must as far as possible choose a course which leads us in the direction of the thoughts that we conceive to be noble and true. We may make mistakes, we may wander sadly from the way, but I believe that it is our duty, our best hope, to try and 358 Beside Still Waters perceive what it is that God is trying to teach us. Now, our choice must be to a great extent a matter of temperament. Some men like work, activity, injluence, relations with others. Well, if they sincerely believe that they are meant to pursue these things, it is their duty to do so. Others t like myself, seem to be gifted with a sensitiveness of perception, and appreciation of beauty in many forms. I cannot believe that such an organisation is given me fortuitously, and that I am merely meant to suppress it. Of course the same argument could be used sophis- tically by a man with strong sensual passions and appetites, who could similarly urge that he must be intended to gratify them. But such gratification leads both to personal disaster and to the increase of unhappiness in the race. Such instincts as I recognise in myself seem to me to do neither. I believe that poets, artists, and musicians, to say nothing of religious teachers, have effected almost more for the welfare of the race than statesmen, patriots, and philanthrop- ists. Of course the necessary work of the world has got to be done ; but my own belief is that a good deal more than is necessary is done, because people pursue luxury rather than simplicity. I recognise to the full the duty of work ; but, to be quite honest, I tliink that a serious man who will preach simplicity, disseminate ideas, suggest pos- Criticism of Life 359 sibilities of intellectual and artistic pleasure, can do a very real work. Such a man must be dis- inter esttd ; he must not desire fame or influence ; he must be content if he can sow the seeds of beauty in a few minds. " Now the Maudle and Postlethwaite school are not concerned with anything of the kind. They merely desire to make a sort of brightly polished mirror of their minds, capable of re- flecting all sorts of beautiful effects, and this is an essentially effeminate thing to do, because it exalts the appreciation of sensation above all other aims ; that is the pursuit of artistic lux- ury, and it is, as you say, quite inconsistent with good citizenship. I have no admiration for the citizenship the end of wJiich is to make a com- fortable corner for one's self at the expense of oth- ers ; I do not at all believe that every man of ideals is bound to take a part in the administra- tion of the community. We can easily have too many administrators ; and that ends in the dis- mal slough of municipal politics. After all, we must nowadays all be specialists, and a man has as much right to specialise in beauty as he has to specialise in Greek Grammar. In fact a specialist in Greek Grammar has as his ulti- mate vieiv the clearer and nicer appreciation of the shades of Greek expression, and is merely serving a high ideal of mental refinement. It 360 Beside Still Waters seems to me purely conventional to accept as val- uable the work of a commentator on Sophocles, because it is traditionally respectable, and to say that a commentator on sunsets, as I once heard a poet described, is an effeminate dilettante. It is the motive that matters. Personally, I think that a man who has drifted into writing a commentary on Sophocles , because he happens to find that he can earn a living that way, is no more worthy of admiration than a man who earns his living by billiard-marking. Neither are necessary to the world. But the commentator and the billiard-marker are alike admirable, if they are working out a theory, if they think that thus and thus they can best help on the pro- gress of the world. " My own desire is, so to speak, to be a commen- tator on life, in one particular aspect. I think the world would be all the better(if \here were a finer appreciation of what is noble and beautiful, a deeper discrimination of motives, a larger speculation as to the methods and objects of our pilgrimage. I think the coarseness of the intellectual and spiritual palate that prevails widely nowadays is not only a -misfortune, I think it is of the nature of sin. If people could live more in the generous visions of poets, if they could be taught to see beauty in trees and fields and buildings, I think they would be happier and A Theory of Life 3 61 better. Most people are obliged to spend the solid hours of the day in necessary work. The more sordid that work is, the more advisable it is to cultivate a perception of the quality of things. Every one has hours of recreation in every day ; the more such hours are filled with pleasant, simple, hopeful, beautiful thoughts, the better for us all. " Of course I may be quite wrong ; I may be meant to find out my mistake ; but I seem to discern in the teaching of Christ a desire to make men see the true values of life, to appreciate what is beautiful and tender in simple lives and homely relationships. The teaching of Christ seems to me to be uniquely and essentially poeti- cal, and to point to the fact that the uplifting of the human heart in admiration, hope, and love, is the cure for some, at least, of our manifold ills. That is my own theory of life, and I do not see that it is effeminate, or even unpracti- cal ; and it is a mere caricature of it to call it Epicurean. What does complicate life is the feeble acceptance of conventional views, the doing of things, not because one hopes for happiness out of them, not even because one likes them, but because one sees other people doing them. Even in the most sheltered existence, like my own, there are plenty of things which provide a bracing tonic against self-satisfaction. There 362 Beside Still Waters are the criticism and disapproval of others, con- tempt, hostility ; there are illness, and sorrow, and the fear of death. No one of a sensitive nature can hope to live an untroubled life ; but to court unhappiness for the sake of its tonic qualities seems to me no more reasonable than to refuse an anesthetic on the ground that it is interfering with natural processes. " / don't know that I expect to convert you ; but at least I am glad to make my position clear. I don't assume that I am in the right. I only know that I am trying to do what ap- pears to me to be right, trying to simplify the issues of life, to unravel the tangle in which so many people seem to me to acquiesce helplessly and timidly'' XXXVI THERE were days, of course, when Hugh's reflections took an irrepressibly optimistic turn. Such was a bright day in the late summer, when ^*^^*^^*^*^ L : i i the sun shone with a temperate clearness, and big white clouds, like fragments torn from some aerial pack of cotton-wool, moved blithely in the sky. Hugh rode he was staying at his mother's house to a little village perched a- stride on a great ridge. He diverged from the road to visit the ancient church, built of mas- sive stone and roofed with big stone-tiles ; up there, swept by strong winds, splashed by fierce rains, it has grown to look like a crag rather than a building. By the side of it ran a little, steep, narrow lane, which he had never ex- plored ; he rode cautiously down the stony track, among thick hazel copses ; occasionally, through a gap, he had a view of a great valley, all wild with wood ; once or twice he passed a timbered farmhouse, with tall brick chimneys. The coun. try round about was much invaded by new pert houses, but there were none here ; and 363 364 Beside Still Waters Hugh supposed that this road, which seemed the only track into the valley, was of so forbid- ding a steepness that it had not occurred to any one to settle there. The road became more and more precipitous, and at the very bottom, having descended nearly three hundred feet, Hugh found himself in a very beautiful place. He thought he had never seen anything more sweetly, more characteristically English. On one side was a rough^ field, encircled by forest on all sides; here stood some old wooden sheds and byres ; and one or two green rides passed glimmering into the thick copse, with a charm- ing air of mystery, as though they led to some sequestered woodland paradise. To the right was a mill, with a great pond thick with bulrushes and water-lilies, full of water-birds, coots, and moor-hens, which swam about, utter- ing plaintive cries. The mill was of wood, the planks warped and weather-stained, the tiled roof covered with mosses ; the mill-house itself was a quaint brick building, with a pretty garden, full of old-fashioned flowers, sloping down to the pool ; a big flight of pigeons cir- cled round and round in the breeze, turning with a sudden clatter of wings ; behind the house were small sand-stone bluffs, fringed with feathery ashes, and the wood ran up steeply above into the sky. It looked like an old steel- The Mill 365 engraving, like a picture by Morland or Con- stable. The blue smoke went up from the chimneys in that sheltered nook, rising straight into the air, lending a rich colour to the trees behind. Hugh thought it would be a beautiful place to live in, so remote from the world, in that still valley, where the only sound was the wind of the copses, the trickle of the mill-leat, and the slow thunder of the dripping wheel within. Yet he supposed that the simple peo- ple who lived there were probably unconscious of its beauty, and only aware that the roads which led to the spot were inconveniently steep. Still, it was hard to think that the charm of the place would not pass insensibly into the hearts, perhaps even into the faces, of the dwellers there. He stood for a little to see the bright water leaping clear and fresh from the sluice. There was a delicious scent of cool river-plants every- where. It was hard not to think that the stream, bickering out in the sun from the still pool, had a sense of joy and delight. It was passing, passing; Hugh could trace in thought every mile of the way ; down the wooded valley it was bound, running over the brown gravel, by shady wood-ends and pasture sides ; then it would pass out into the plain, and run, a full and brimming stream, between sandy banks, 366 Beside Still Waters half hidden by the thick, glossy-leaved alders. Hugh knew the broad water-meadows down below, with the low hills on either side, where big water-plants grew in marshy places, and where the cattle moved slowly about through the still hours. Soon the stream would be run- ning by the great downs it was a river now, bearing boats upon it till it passed by the wharves and beneath the bridges of the little town, and out into the great sea-flat, meeting, with how strange a wonder, the upward-creeping briny tide, with its sharp savours and its whole, some smell; till it flowed at last by the docks, where the big steamers lay unlading, blowing their loud sea-horns, past weed-fringed piers and shingly beaches, until it was mingled with the moving deep, where the waves ran higher on the blue sea-line, and the great buoy rolled and dipped above the shoal. And then, perhaps, it would be drawn up again in twisted wreaths of mist, rising in vapour beneath the breathless sun, to flock back, per- haps, in clouds over the earth, and begin its little pilgrimage again. Was the same true, he wondered, of himself, of everything about him ? Was it all a never- ending, and unwearying pilgrimage ? Was death itself but the merging of the atom in the element, and then, perhaps, the race began The Stream's Pilgrimage 367 again ? On such a day as this, of bright sun and eager air. it seemed sweet to think that it was even so. This soul-stuff, that one called one's self, wafted out of the unknown, strangely entangled with the bodily elements, would it perhaps mingle again with earthly conditions, borne round and round in an endless progres- sion ? Yet, if this was so, why did one seem, not part of the world, but a thing so wholly distinct and individual? To-day, indeed, Hugh seemed to be akin to the earth, and felt as though all that breathed or moved and lived had a brotherly, a sisterly greeting for him. As he moved slowly on up the steep road, a child playing by the wayside, encouraged perhaps by a loving brightness that rose from Hugh's heart into his face, nodded and smiled to him shyly. Hugh smiled back, and waved his hand. That childish smile came to him as a confirmation of his blithe mood ; there were others, then, bound on the same pilgrimage as himself, who wished him well, and shared his happiness. To pass thus smiling through the world, heedless as far as might be of weariness and sorrow, taking the simple joys that flowed so freely, if only one divested one's self of the hard and dull ambitions that made life into a struggle and a contest that was, perhaps, the secret ! There would be days, no doubt, of gloom and 368 Beside Still Waters heaviness ; days when life would run, like the stream which he could hear murmuring below him, through dark coverts, dripping with rain ; days of frost, when nature was leafless and be- numbed, and when the rut was barred with icy spikes. But one could live in hope and faith, waiting for the summer days, when life ran swift and bright, under a pale sunset sky till the streaks of crimson light died into a trans- parent green ; and the stream ran joyfully, under the stars, wondering what sweet un- familiar place might stand revealed, when the day climbed slowly in the east, and the dew globed itself upon the fresh grass, in the invig- orating sweetness, the cool fragrance of the dawn. XXXVII ONE hot cloudless day of summer, Hugh took a train, and, descending at a quiet wayside station, walked to a little place deep in the country, to see the remains of an ancient house which he was told had a great beauty. He found the place with some difficulty. The church, to which he first directed his steps, was very ancient and almost ruinous. It was evi- dently far too big for the needs of the little hamlet, and it was so poorly endowed that it was difficult to find any one who would take the liv- ing. A great avenue of chestnuts, with a grass- grown walk beneath, led up to the porch. He entered by a curious iron-bound door, under a Norman arch of very quaint workmanship. The crunch., was of different dates, and the very neglect which it suffered gave it an extreme picturesqueness. One of its fine features was a brick chapel, built at the east end of one of the aisles, where an old baron lay in state, in black armour, his eyes closed quietly, his pointed beard on his breast, his hands folded, as though 24 369 370 Beside Still Waters he lay praying to himself. The heavy marble pillars of the shrine were carved with a stiff ornament of vine-leaves and grape-clusters, and the canopy rose pompously to the roof, with its cognisances and devices. There were many monuments in the church, on which Hugh read the history of the ancient family, now en- gulfed in a family more wealthy and ancient still ; the latest of the memorials was that of a lady, whose head, sculptured by Chantrey, with its odd puffs of hair, had a discreet and smiling mien, as of one who had known enough sorrow to purge prosperity of its grossness. From the churchyard there led a little path, which skirted a wide moat of dark water, full of innumerable fish, basking in the warmth ; in the centre of the moat stood a dark grove of trees, with a thick undergrowth. Suddenly, through an opening, Hugh saw the turrets of an ancient gatehouse, built of mellow brick, rising into the sunlight, with an astonishing sweetness and nobleness of air ; below was a lawn, bordered by yew-hedges, where a party of people, ladies in bright dresses and leisurely men, were sitting talking with a look of smiling content. It was more like a scene in a romance than a thing in real life. Hugh stood unobserved beneath a tree, and looked long at the delightful picture ; and then presently wandered further by a grassy lane, A Garden Scene 37 * with high hedges full of wild roses and elder- blooms, where the air had a hot, honied per- fume. He came in a moment to a great clear stream running silently between banks full of meadow-sweet and loosestrife. The turrets of the gate-house looked pleasantly over the trees of the little park that lay on the other side of the stream. The air was still but fresh. The trees stood silent, with the metallic look of high summer upon their stiff leaves, as though seen in a picture. The whole landscape seemed to have a consecration of quiet joy and peace over it. It seemed a place made for the walks of rustic lovers, on summer evenings, under a low- hung moon. The whole scene, the homely bridge, the murmur of the water in the pool, the blossoming hedges, had a sense of delicate romance about it. It seemed to stand for so much happiness, and to draw Hugh into the charmed circle. The difficulty was somehow to believe that the place was in reality a centre of real and ordinary life ; it seemed almost impossibly beautiful and delicious to Hugh, like a play en- acted for his sole benefit, a sweet tale told. Those gracious persons in the garden seemed like people in a scene out of Boccaccio, whose past and whose future are alike veiled and un- known and who just emerge, in the light of art, 37 2 Beside Still Waters as a sweet company seen for an instant, and yet somehow eternally there. But the thought that they were persons like himself, with cares, schemes, anxieties, appeared inconceivable; that was one of the curious illusions of life, that the world through which one moved seemed to group itself for one's delight into a pleasant vision, which had no concern for one's self ex- cept to brighten and enhance the warm sunlit day with an indescribable grace and beauty. How hard to think that it was all changing and shifting, even while one gazed ! that the clear water, lapsing through the sluice, was passing onwards, and could never again be at that one sweet point of its seaward course ; that the roses were fading and dying beside him ; that the pleasant group on the lawn must soon break up, never perhaps to reassemble. If one could but arrest the quiet flow of things for a moment, suspend it for a period, however brief ! That was after all the joy of art, that it caught such a moment as that, while the smiling faces turned to each other, while the sun lay warm on the brickwork, and made it immortal ! There came into Hugh's mind the thought that this deep thirst for peace might somehow yet be satisfied. How could he otherwise con- ceive of it, how could he dream so clearly of it, if it were not actually there ? He thought that A Vision 373 there must be a region where the pulse of time should cease to beat, where there should be no restless looking backwards and forwards, but where the spirit should brood in an unend- ing joy; but now, the world thrust one for- ward, impatient, unsatisfied ; even as he gazed, the shadows had shifted and lengthened, and the thought of the world, that called him back to care and anxiety, began to over- shadow him. Was it a phantom that mocked him ? or was it not rather a type, an allegory of something unchanged and unchangeable, that waited for him beyond ? And then in that still afternoon, there came to him a sense that occasionally visited him, and that seemed, when it came, the truest and best thing \^S in the world, the vision of an unseen Friend, to Whom he was infinitely dear, closer to Him even than to himself, Who surrounded and enveloped him with care and concern and love ; Who brought him tenderly into the fair green places of the earth, such as he had visited to-day, whispered to him the secret of it all, and only did not reveal it in its fulness because the time for him to know it was not yet, and because the very delay arose from some depth of unimaginable, love. In such a mood as this, Hugh felt that he could wait in utter confidence ; that he could drink 374 Beside Still Waters in with glad eyes and ears the beautiful and delicate things that were shown to him, the rich, luxuriant foliage, the dim sun-warmed stream, the silent trees, the old towers. There seemed to him nothing that he could not bear, nothing that he could not gladly do, when so tender a hand was leading him. He knew indeed that he would again be impa- tient, restless, wilful ; but for the moment it was as though he had tasted of some mys- terious sacrament ; that the wine of some holy cup had been put to his lips ; that he knew that he was not alone, but in the very heart of a wise and patient God. XXXVIII IT was in the later weeks of a hot, still mid- summer that Hugh escaped from Cambridge to the Lakes. He did not realise, until he found himself driving in the cool of the evening be- side Windermere, how parched and dry his very mind had become in the long heats of the sun- dried flats. Sometimes the road wound down to the very edge of the water, lapping deliciously among the stones; sometimes it skirted the pleasances of a cool sheltered villa which lay embowered in trees, blinking contentedly across the lake. The sight of the great green hills with their skirts clothed with wood, with trees straggling upwards along the water-courses, the miniature crags escaping from oak-coppices, the black heads of bleak mountains, filled him with an exquisite and speechless delight. It was sunset before he reached his destina- tion, which was a large house of rough stone, much festooned with creepers, which crowned a little height at the base of the fells, in the cen- tre of a wild wood. The house was that of a very old man, hard on his ninetieth year, a 375 37 6 Beside Still Waters relative of Hugh's, and an old friend of his family. There was a short cut to the house among the woods, and Hugh left the carriage to go round by the drive, while he himself walked up. The path was a little track among copses, roofed over by interlacing boughs, and giving an abundance of pretty glimpses to right and left of the unvisited places of the wood ; old brown boulders covered with moss, with ash-suckers shooting out among the stones, little streams rippling downwards, small green lawns fringed with low trees. The western valley was full of a rich golden light, and the wooded ridges rose quietly one after another, with the dark solemn form of mountains on the horizon. A few dap- pled clouds, fringed with fire, floated high in the green sky. It all seemed to him to be screening some sacred and mysterious pageant, which was, as it were, being celebrated out in the west, where the orange sunset lay dying. He thought of the lonely valleys among the hills, slowing filling with twilight gloom, the high ridges from which one could discern the sun sinking in glory over the far-spread flashing sea with its misty rim. The house loomed up suddenly over the thickets, with a light or two burning in the windows which pierced the thick wall. Within, all was as it had been for many a year ; Tranquil Life 377 it was a house in which everything seemed to stand still, the day passing smoothly in a simple and pleasant routine. He received a very kindly and gentle welcome from his host, and was pleased to find that the party was of the quietest an old friend or two, a_widowed daughter of the house, one or two youthful cousins. Hugh slipped into his place in the household as if he had never been absent ; he established his books in a corner of the dark library ful of old volumes. It was always a pleasure to him to see his host, a courtly, silent old man, with snow-white hair and beard, who sat smiling, eating so little that Hugh wonder- ed how he sustained life, reading for an hour or two, walking a little about the garden, sitting long in contented meditation, never seeming to be weary or melancholy. Hugh remembered that, some years before, he had wondered that any one could live so, neither looking back- wards nor forwards, with no designs or cares or purposes, simply_t_aking.-each..xlay. as it jcame with a perfect tranquillity, not overshadowed by the thought of how few years of life were left him. But now he seemed to understand it better; it was just the soft close of a kindly and innocent life, dying like a tree or a flower. The old man liked to have Hugh as the com- panion of his morning ramble, showed him 378 Beside Still Waters many curious plants and flowers, and spoke often of the reminiscences of his departed youth with no shadow of desire or regret. At first the grateful coolness of the place revived Hugh ; but the soft, moist climate brought with it a fatigue of its own, an indolent dejection, which made him averse to work and even to bodily activity. He took, however, one or two lonely walks among the mountains. In his listless mood, he was vexed and disquieted by the contrast between the utter peace and beauty of the hills, which seemed to uplift themselves, half in majesty and half in appeal, into the still sky, as though they had struggled out of the world, and yet desired a further blessing, the contrast between their meek and rugged pa- tience and the noisy, dusty crowd of shameless and indifferent tourists, that circulated among the green valleys, like a poisonous fluid in the veins of the wholesome mountains. They brought a kind of a blight upon the place ; and yet they were harmless, inquisitive people, tempted thither, most of them by fashion, a few perhaps by a feeble love of beauty, and only desirous to bring their own standard of comforts with them. The world seemed out of joint ; the radical ugliness and baseness of man an insult to the purity and sweetness of nature. On the Fell 379 Hugh walked back, in a close and heavy after- noon, across the fell, with these thoughts strug- gling together in his heart. The valley was breathlessly still, and the flies buzzed round him as he disturbed them from the bracken. The whole world looked so sweet and noble, that it was impossible not to think that it was moulded and designed by a Will of unutterable gracious- ness and beauty. From the top, beside a little crag full of clinging trees, that held on tena- ciously to the crevices and ledges, with so per- fect an accommodation to their precarious sit- uation, Hugh surveyed the wide valleys, and saw the smoke ascend from hamlets and houses, the lake as still as a mirror, while the shadows lengthened on the hills, which seemed indeed to change their very shapes by delicate gradations. It looked perfectly peaceful and serene. Yet in how many houses were there unquiet and suf- fering hearts, waiting in vain for respite or re- lease ! The rjain of the world pressed_ heavily upon Hugh ; it seemed that if he could have breathed out his life there upon the hill-top among the fern, to mingle with the incense of the evening, that would be best ; and yet even while he thought it, there seemed to contend with his sadness an immense desire for joy, for life; how many beautiful things there were to see, to hear, to feel, to say ; to be loved, to be 3^0 Beside Still Waters needed how Hugh craved for that ! While he sat, there alighted on his knee, with much deliberation, a dry, varnished-looking, orange- banded fly, which might have almost been turned out of a manufactory a moment before. It sent out a thin and musical buzzing, as it cleaned its brown large-eyed head industriously with its long legs. It seemed to wish to sit with Hugh ; and again and again, after a short flight, it returned to the same place. What was the meaning of this tiny, definite life, with its short space of sun and shade, made with so curious and elaborate an art, so whimsically adorned and glorified ? Here again he was touched close by the impenetrable mystery of things. But presently the cheerful and com- placent creature flew off on some secret errand, and Hugh was left alone again. He descended swiftly into the valley ; the road was full of dust. The vehicles, full of chattering, smoking, vacuous persons were speeding home. The hands of many were full of poor fading flowers, torn from lawn and ledge to please a momentary whim. Yet beside the road slid the clear stream over its shingle, pass- ing from brisk cascades into dark and silent pools, fringed with rich water-plants, the trees bowing over the water. How swiftly one passed from disgust and ugliness into unimag- Peace 381 ined peace ! It was all going forwards, all changing, all tending to some unknown goal. Hugh found his host sitting on the terrace, under a leafy sycamore, a perfect picture of jioly age and serenity. He listened to the recital of HughVlitHe adventures with a smile, and said that he had often walked over the fell in the old days, but did not suppose he would ever see it again. " I am just waiting for my release," he said, with a little nod of his head ; " every time that I sit here, I think it may very likely be thejast." Hugh longed to ask him the secret of this contented and passionless peace, but he knew there could be no answer; it was the kindly gift of God. The sunset died away among the blue hill- ranges, and a soft breeze began to stir among the leaves of the sycamore overhead. A night- jar sent out its liquid, reiterated note from the heather, and a star climbed above the edge of the dark hill. Here was peace enough, if he could but reach it and seize it. Yet it softly eluded his grasp, and seemed only to mock him as unattainable. Should he ever seize it ? There was no answer possible ; yet a message seemed to come wistfully and timidly, flying like a night-bird out of the wild woodland, as though it would have settled near him , but it left him with the same inextinguishable hunger 382 Beside Still Waters of the heart, that seemed to be increased rather than fed by the fragrant incense of the garden, the sight of the cool, glimmering paths, the pale rock rising from the turf, the silent pool. XXXIX HUGH was staying in the country with his mother. It was a bright morning in the late summer, and he had just walked out on to the little gravel-sweep before the house, which commanded~a view of a pleasant wooded valley with a stream running through ; it was one of those fresh days, with a light breeze rustling the trees, when it seemed good to be alive ; rain had fallen in the night, and had washed the dust of a long drought off the trees ; some soft aerial pigment seemed mingled with the air, lending a rich lustre to everything ; the small woods on the hillside opposite had a mellow colour, and the pastures between were of radi- ant and transparent freshness ; the little gusts whirled over the woodland, turning the under sides of the leaves up, and brightening the whole with a dash of lighter green. Just at this moment a telegram was put into Hugh's hand, announcing the sudden death of an elderly lady, who had been a good friend to him for over twenty years. Death seemed to 383 384 Beside Still Waters be everywhere about him, and the bright scene suddenly assumed an almost heartless aspect of mirth ; but he put the thought from him, and strove rather to feel that life and death rejoice together. Later in the day he heard more particu- lars. His friend was a wealthy woman who had lived a very quiet life for many years in a pleasant country-house. She had often spoken to Hugh of her fear of a long and tedious illness, wearing alike to both the suf- ferer and those in attendance, when the mind may become fretful, fearful, and impatient in the last scene, just when one most desires that the latest memories of one's life may be cheerful, brave, and serene. Her prayer had been very tenderly answered ; she had been ailing of late ; but she had been sitting talking in her drawing-room the day before, to a quiet family group, when she had been seized with a sudden faintness, and had died gently, in a few minutes, smiling palely, and probably not even knowing that she was in any sort of danger. Hugh spent the day mostly in solitude, and retraced in tender thought the stages of their long friendship. His friend had been a woman of strong and marked individuality, who had loved life, and had made many loyal friends. She was intensely, almost morbidly, aware of A Friend 385 the suffering of the world, especially of animals ; and Hugh remembered how she had once told him that a shooting-party in the neighbouring squire's woods had generally meant for her a sleepless night, at the thought of wounded birds and beasts suffering and bleeding the long hours through, couched in the fern, faint with pain, and wondering patiently what hard thing had befallen them. She had been a wo- man of strong preferences and prejudices, marked likes and dislikes ; intensely critical of others, even of those she loved best. Her talk was lively, epigrammatic, and pungent ; she was the daughter of a famous Whig house, and had the strong aristocratical prejudices, coupled with a theoretical belief in popular equality, so often found in old Whig families. But this superiority betrayed itself not in any obvious arrogance or disdain, but in a high and distinguished personal courtesy, that penetrated as if by a subtle aroma all that she said or did. Though careless of personal appearance, with no grace of beauty, and wearing habitu- ally the oldest clothes, she was yet indisputably the first person in any society in which she found herself. She was intensely reserved about herself, her family, her possessions, and her past ; but Hugh had an inkling that there had been some deep disappointment in the 25 386 Beside Still Waters background, which had turned a passionately affectionate nature into a fastidious and critical temperament. She had a wonderful contralto voice, and a real genius for music ; she could rarely be persuaded to touch an instrument ; but occasionally, with a small and familiar party, she would sing a few old songs with a pas- sion and a depth of melancholy feeling that produced an almost physical thrill in her audiences. She was of an indolent tempera- ment, read little, never worked, had few phil- anthropic or social instincts ; she was always ready to talk, but was equally content to spend long afternoons sitting alone before a fire, just shielding her eyes from the blaze, meditating with an intentness that seemed as though she were revolving over and over again some particular memory, some old and sad problem for which she could find no solution. Hugh used to think that she blamed herself for something irreparable. But her gift of humour, of incisive penetra- tion, of serious enthusiasm, made it always re- freshing to be with her; and Hugh found himself reflecting that though it had been in many ways so inarticulate and inactive a life, it yet seemed, by virtue of a certain vivid quality, a certain subdued fire, a life of imperishable worth. She had been both generous and severe in her The Gate of Life 387 judgments ; but there had never been anything tame or mild or weak about her. She had al- ways known her own mind ; she yielded freely to impulse without ever expressing regret or re- pentance. Small as her circle had been, Hugh yet felt that she had somehow affected the world ; and yet he could indicate nothing that she had accomplished, except for the fact that she had been a kind of bracing influence in the lives of all who had come near her. Her last message to him had been an in- tensely sympathetic letter of outspoken en- couragement. She had heard that a severe judgment had been passed upon Hugh's writ- ings by a common friend. She knew that this had been repeated to Hugh, and judged rightly that it had hurt and wounded him. Her letter was to the effect that the judgment was entirely baseless, and that he was to pursue the line he had taken up without any attempt to deviate from it. It went to Hugh's heart that he had made little effort of late, owing to circum- stances and pressure of work, to see her; but he knew that she was aware of his affection, and he had never doubted hers. He felt, too, that if there had been anything to forgive, any shadow of dissatisfaction, it was forgiven in that moment. Her death seemed somehow to Hugh to be the strongest proof he had ever 388 Beside Still Waters received of the permanent identity of the soul; it was impossible to think of her as not there ; equally impossible was it to think of her as wrapped in sleep, or even transformed to a heav- enly meekness ; he could think of her, with per- haps an added brightness of demeanour, at the knowledge of how easy a thing after all had been the passage she had feared, with the dark eyes that he knew so well, like wells of fire in the pale face, smiling almost disdainfully at the thought that others should grieve for her ; she was one whom it was impossible ever to com- passionate, and Hugh could not compassionate her now. She would have had no sort of tol- erance for any melancholy or brooding grief; she would desire to be tenderly remembered, but she would have been utterly impatient of the thought that any grief for her should weaken or darken the outlook of her friends upon the world. Hugh resolved, with a great flood of strong love for his friend, that he would grieve for her as she would have had him grieve, as though they were but separated for a little. She had left, he learned, the most decisive di- rection that no one should be summoned to her funeral : that was so like .her brave, sensible nature; she desired the grief for her to be whole- some and temperate grief, with no lingering over the sad accidents of mortality. Hugh felt The Gate of Lile 389 the strong bond of friendship, that had existed between them, grow and blossom into a vigor- ous and enduring love. She seemed close beside him all that day, approving his efforts after a joyful tranquillity. He could almost see her, if he sank for a moment into a tearful sor- sow, casting upward that impatient look he knew so well, if any instance of human weakness were related in her presence. And thus the death of his old friend seemed, as the day drew on, to have brought a strange brightness into his life, by making the darkless terrible, the unknown more familiar. She was there, with the same brave courtesy, the same wholesome scorn, the same humorous decisive- ness ; and though the thought of the gap came like an ache into his mind, again and again, he resolved that he would not yield to ineffectual sadness ; but that he would be worthy of the friendship which she had given him, not easily, he remembered, but after long testing and weighing his character ; and that he would be faithful he prayed that he might be that to so pure and generous a gift. XL IN Hugh's temperament, sensitive and eager as it was, there was a strong tendency to live in the future and in the past rather than in the present. In the past, he realised, he could live without dismay, and without languor, because the mind has so extraordinary a power of sift- ing its memories, of throwing away and dis- regarding all that is sordid, ugly, and base, and retaining only the finest gold. But there was ajdanger of dwelling two much upon the future, because the anxious mind, fertile in imagination, was so apt to weave for itself pictures of dis- couragement and failure, sad dilemmas, dreary dishonours, calamities, shadows, woes. How often had the thought of what might be in .store clouded the pure sunshine of some bright day of summer ; how often had the thought of isolation, of loss, of bereavement, hung like a cloud between himself and his intercourse even with those whom he most feared to lose ! He thought sometimes of that sad and yet bracing sentiment, uttered by one whose life had been 390 A Funeral Pomp 39 l / filled with every delight that wealth, guided by cultivated taste, could purchase. " My life," said this wearied man, " has been clouded by troubles, most of which never happened." But even apart from the sorrows which he knew might or might not befall him, there was one darkest shadow, the shadow of death, the cessation of beloved energies, of delightful prospects, of the sweet interchange of friend- ship, of the bright and brave things of life. Could one, he asked himself, ever come to re- gard death as a natural, a beautiful thing, a delicious resting from life, an appointed goal ? It was the one thing certain and inevitable, the last terror, the final silence, which it seemed nothing could break. The thought came to him with a deep insist- ence on a day when the funeral services for a great personage, called away without a single warning, were held in the chapel of his own college. There was a great gathering of friends and residents. The long procession, blackrobed and bareheaded, with the chilly winter sun shining down on the court, wound slowly through the college buildings, with many halts, and at last entered the great chapel, the organ playing softly a melody of pathetic grief, in which the sad revolt of human hearts that had loved life and the warm, kind world, made 39 2 Beside Still Waters itself heard. They passed to their places, and then very slowly and heavily the sad and helpless burden, the coffin, veiled and palled, freighted with the rich scents of the dying flowers that lay in stainless purity upon it, was borne to its place. The life of their brother had been a very useful, happy, and innocent life, full of quiet energies, of simple activi- ties, of refined pleasures. There seemed no need for its suspension. The very suddenness of the summons had been a beautiful and kindly thing, attended by no fears and little suffering but kindly, only upon the sup- position that it was necessary. The holy service proceeded, the voice of old human sorrow, of tender hope, of ardent faith, thrill- ing through the mournful words. It was well, no doubt, as acquiescence was inevitable, to acquiesce as patiently, even as eagerly as possible. But there were two alternatives : one that the beloved life had gone out utterly, as an expiring flame ; if so was it not well to know it, so that one might frame one's life upon that sad knowledge? yet the heart could not bear to think it ; and then Faith seemed to step in, dimly smiling, finger on lip, and pointing upwards. If that smile, that pointing hand, meant anything, why could there not be sent some hint of cer- Fear 393 tainty that the sweet, fragrant life that was over, so knit up with love and friendship and regard, had a further, a serener future awaiting it? The question was, did such a scene as was then enacted hold any real and vital message of hope for the soul ; or was it a thing to turn the back upon, to forget, to banish, as merely casting a shadow upon the joyful energies of life? It seemed to Hugh, when the sad rites were done, and he was left alone, that there was but one solution possible the thought shaped itself dimly and wistfully out of the dark that there was one element that was out of place, one ele- ment over which the mind had a certain power, that one must resolve to exorcise and cast out the element of fear. And yet fear, that unman- ning, abominable thing, that struck the light out of life, that made one incapable of energy and activity alike, was that, too, not a dark gift from the Father's hand? Had it a purifying, a restoring influence? It seemed to Hugh that it had none. Yet why was it made so terribly easy, so insupportably natural, if it had not its place in the great economy of God ? Was not this the darkest of dark dilemmas? Slowly re- flecting on it, Hugh seemed to see that fear had one effect of good about it ; it was one of those things, and alas they were many, that seemed 394 Beside Still Waters strewn about us only that we might learn to tri- umph over them. /'For one who really believed in the absolutely infinite and all-embracingwill of God, there was no room for fear at all. j( If me things of life were sent wisely, tenderly," and graciously, not care, not suffering, not even death admitted of any questioning ; and yet fear seemed a deeper, more instinctive thing than reasoning itself. The very fear of non- existence, in the light of reason, seemed a wholly unreal thing. No shadow of it attached to the long dark years of the world, which had passed before one's own conscious life began. One could look back in the pages of history to the ancient pageant of the world in which one had no part, and not feel one's self wronged or I misused in having had no share in those vivid ' things. Why should we regard a past in which we had had no conscious part with such a blithe serenity, and yet look forward to that future in which, for all we knew, we could have no part either, with such an envious despair? The thought was unreasonable enough, but it was there. But it was possible, by thus boldly and tranquilly confronting the problem, to diminish the pressure of the shadow. A man could throw himself, could he not, in utter con- fidence before the feet of God, claiming nothing, demanding nothing but the sense of perfect The Daily Manna 395 acquiescence in His will and deed? The secret again was, not to forecast and forebode, but to live in the day and for the day, practising labour, kindliness, gentleness, peace. That was a true image, the image of those old pilgrims who gathered the manna for their daily use ; little or much, it sufficed ; and no one might, through indolence or prudence, evade the daily labour by laying up a store ; the store vanished in corruption. So it was with all ambitious dreams, all attempts to lay a jealous hand on what might be ; it was that which poisoned life. Those far-reaching plans, those hopes of ease and glory, that wealth laid up for many years, they were the very substance of decay. Even fear itself must be accepted, when it was whole- somely and inevitably there ; but not amplified, added to, dwelt upon. How rarely was one in doubt about the next, the immediate duty. And one could surely win^by patient practice, by resolute effort, the power of casting out of the moment the shadow of the uneasy days ahead. How simple, how brief those very un- easinesses turned out to be ! Things were never as bad as one feared, ever easier than one had hoped. It was a false prudence, a foolish cal- culation, to think that by picturing the terrors of a crisis one made it easier when it came ; just as one so sadly discounted joys by anticipation 39 6 Beside Still Waters and found them hollow, disappointing husks when they lay open in the hand. Hugh rose from his thoughts and walked to the window. The day was dying, robed in a sol- emn pomp. The fields were shrouded in mist but the cloud-rims in the west were touched with intense edges of gold ; Hugh thought of the little churchyard that lay beyond those trees, where, under the raw mould heaped up so mutely, under the old wall, beside the yew-tree, in the shadow of the chancel-gable, lay the per- ishing vesture of the spirit of his friend, ban- ished from light and warmth to his last cold house. How lonely, how desolate it seemed ; and the mourners, too, sitting in the dreary rooms, with the agony of the gap upon them, the empty chair, the silent voice, the folded papers, the closed books ! How could God atone for all that, even though He made all things new? It was not what was new, but what was old, for which one craved ; that long perspective of summer mornings, of pacings to and fro, of happy work, of firelit evenings, of talk, of laughter, the groups breaking up and reforming how little one had guessed and val- ued the joy, the content, the blessing of them at the time ! In the midst of them, one was reach- ing forwards, restlessly and vainly, to the fut- ure that was to be richer yet. Then the future The Lapsing Moment 397 became the happy present, and still one had leaned forward. How idle it was ! even while he waited and gazed, the light of evening was gone, the clouds were lustreless and wan, the sunset, that band of golden light, was flying softly, a girdle of beauty round the world ; but the twi- light and the night had their beauty, too, their peace, their refreshment, their calm. J XLI IT must not be thought that because this lit- tle book attempts to trace the more secret and solitary thoughts of Hugh, as his soul took shape under the silent influences of pensive re- flection, that the current of his life was all passed in lonely speculation. He had a definite place in the world, and mjxejLjwitJLJiis fellow-men, withjK) jiyoidance of the little cares of daily life. He only tended, as solitude became more dear to him, and as the thoughts that he loved best rose more swiftly and vividly about him, to frame his life, as far as he could, upon simple and unambitious lines. In this he acted according to the dictates of a kind of intuition. It was useless, he felt, to analyse motives ; it was impossible to discover how much was disinterestedness, how much un- worldliness, how much the pursuit of truth, how much the avoidance of anxious responsibility, how much pure indolence. He was quite ready to believe that a certain amount of the lat- ter came in, though Hugh was not indolent in 398 Following the Light 399 the ordinary sense of the word. He was incapable of pure idling ; but he was also in- capable of carrying out prolonged and patient labour, unless he was keenly interested in an object; and the fact thatjhe found the renun- jj ciation of ambitions so easy and simple a thing was a sufficient proof to him that his interest in mundane things was not very vital. But Hugh above all things desired to have no illu- sions about himself; and he was saved from personal vanity not so much by humility of na- ture as from a deep sense of the utter depend- ence of all created things on their Creator. He did not look upon his own powers, his own good qualities, as redounding in anyway to his credit, but as the gift of God. He never fell into the error of imagining himself to have achieved anything by his own ability or originality, but only as the outcome of a desire implanted in him by God, who had also furnished him with the requisite perseverance to carry them out. He could not lay his finger on any single quality, and say that he had of his own effort im- proved it. And, in studying the lives and tem- peraments of others, he did not think of their achievements as things which they had accom- plished ; but rather as a sign of the fuller great- ness of glory which had been revealed to them. Life thus became to him a following of light ; 400 Beside Still Waters he desired to know his own limitations, not be- cause of the interest of them, but as indicating to him more clearly what he might undertake. It was a curious proof to him of the appropriate- / ness of each man's conditions and environment / to his own particular nature, when he reflected that no one whom he had ever known, however V unhappy, however faulty, would ..ever .willingly X have exchanged identities with any one else. People desired to be rid of definite afflictions, definite faults ; they desired and envied particu- lar qualities, particular advantages that others possessed, but he could not imagine that any one in the world would exchange any one else's identity for his own ; one would like per- haps to be in another's place, and this was generally accompanied by a feeling that one would be able to make a much better thing of another's sources of happiness and enjoyment, than the person whose prosperity or ability one envied seemed to make. But he could hardly conceive of any extremity of despair so great as to make a human being willing to accept the lot of another in its entirety. Eye_n. one's own faults and limitations were dear to one ; the whole thing character, circumstances, rela- tions with others, position made up to each person the most interesting problem in the world; and this immense consciousness of sepa- Sincerity 401 rateness ; even of essential superiority, was per- haps the strongest argument that Hugh knew in favour of the preservation of a personal identity after death. Hugh then found himself in this position : he was no longer young, but he seemed to him- self to have retained the best part of youth, its openness to new impressions, its zest, its sense of the momentousness of occasions, its hopefulness; he found himself with duties which he felt himself capable of discharging; with a trained literary instinct and a real power of expression ; even if he had not hith- erto produced any memorable work, he felt that he was equipped for the task, if only some great and congenial theme presented itself to his mind. He found himself with a small circle of friends, with a competence, sufficient for his simple needs; day by day! there opened upon his mind ideas, thoughts,' and prospects of ever-increasing mystery and beauty ; as to his character and temperament, he found himself desiring to empty himself of all extraneous elements, all conventional traditions > all adopted ideas; his idea of life indeed was that it was an educative process, and that the further that the soul could advance upon the path of self-knowledge and sincerity, the more } that it could cast away all the things that were 26 402 Beside Still Waters not of its essence, the better prepared one was to be filled with the divine wisdom. The deeper that he plunged into the consideration of the mysterious conditions and laws which surrounded him, the greater the mystery be- came ; but instead of becoming more hopeless, it seemed to him that the dawn appeared to brighten every moment, as one came closer to the appreciation of one's own ignorance, weak- ness and humility. Instead of drawing nearer to despair, he drew every day nearer to a tender simplicity, a larger if more distant hope, an in- tenser desire to be at one with the vast Will that had set him where he was, and that denied him as yet a knowledge of the secret. As he ascended with slow steps into the dark moun- tain of life, the kingdoms of the world became more remote, the noise of their shouting more faint. He thought, with no compassion, but with a wondering tenderness, of the busy throng beneath ; but he saw that, one by one, spirits smitten with the divine hope slipped from that noisy world, and, like himself, began to climb the solitary hills. What lay on the other side ? That he could not even guess ; but he had a belief in the richness, the large- ness of the mind of God ; and he saw as in a vision the day breaking on a purer and sweeter world, full of great surprises, mighty A Better World 403 thoughts, pure joys ; he knew not whether it was near or far, but something in his heart told him that it was assuredly there ! *s XLII How swiftly the summer melted into the autumn ! the old lime-trees in the college court were soon all gold ; how bravely that gold seemed to enrich the heart, on the still, clear, fresh morn- ings of St. Luke's summer ! That wise physician of souls has indeed had set aside for him the most inspiriting, the most healing days of the year, days of tonic coolness, of invigorating colour, of bracing sun ; and then the winter closes in, when light is short, and the sun is low and cold ; when the eye is grateful for the rich brown of naked fields, leafless woods, and misty distances. Yet there is a solemn charm about the darkening day, when the sun sets over the wide plain rolled in smoky vapours and gilded banks of cloud ; and then there is the long fire- lit evening to follow, when books give up their secrets and talk is easiest. The summer, for all its enervating heat, its piercing light, was the time, so Hugh thought, for reflection. In winter the mind is often sunk in a sort of comfortable drowsiness, and 404 Aconite 405 hibernates within its secure cell. Hugh found the activities of work very absorbing in those darker days: his thoughts took on a more placid, more contented tinge. Early in the year he walked alone along the Backs at Cam- bridge. He passed the great romantic gate- posts of St. John's, with the elms of the high garden towering over them, his mind occu- pied with a hundred small designs. It was a shock of inexpressible surprise, as he passed by the clear stream that runs over its sandy shal- lows, and feeds the garden moats, to see that in the Wilderness the ground was bright with the round heads of the yellow aconite, the first flower to hear the message of spring. The appearance of that brave and hardy flower in that particular place had a peculiar and moving association for Hugh. More than twenty years before, in his undergraduate days, in a time of deep perplexity of mind, he had walked that way on a bright Sunday morning, his young heart burdened with sor- rowful preoccupation. How hard those youth- ful griefs had been to bear ! they were so unfamiliar, they seemed so irreparably over- whelming ; one had not learned to look over them or through them ; they darkened the present, they hung like a black cloud over the future. How fantastic, how exaggerated those 406 Beside Still Waters woes had been, and yet how unbearably real ! He had stood, he remembered, to watch the mild sunlight strike in soft shafts among the trees. The hardy blossoms, cold and scentless, but so unmistakably alive, had given him a deep message of hope, a thrill of expectation. He had gone back, he remembered, and in a glow of impassioned emotion had written a little poem on the theme, in a locked note-book, to which he confided his inmost thoughts. He could recall some of the poor stanzas still, so worthless in expression, yet with so fiery a heart. The thought of the long intervening years came back to Hugh with a sense of wonder and gratitude. He had half expected then, he remembered, that some great experience would perhaps come to him, and lift him out of his shadowed thoughts, his vague regrets. That great experience had not befallen him, but how far more wisely and tenderly he had been dealt with instead ! Experience had been lavished upon him ; he had gained interest, he had practised activity, and he had found patience and hope by the way. He knew no more than he knew then of the great and dim design that lay behind the world, and now he hardly desired to know. He had been led, he A Calm 407 had been guided, with a perfect tenderness, a deliberate love. The only lost hours, after all, had been the hours which he had given to anxiety and doubt, to ambition and desire. When the moment had come, which he had heavily anticipated, there had never been any question as to how he should act ; and yet he had not been a mere puppet moved by forces outside his control. He could not harmonise the sense of guidance with the sense of free- dom, and yet both had undoubtedly been there. He had been dealt with both frankly and tenderly ; not saved from fruitful mistakes, not forbidden to wander; and yet his mistakes had never been permitted to be irreparable, his wanderings had taught him to desire the road rather than to dread the desert. A great sense of tranquillity and peace settled down upon his spirit. He cast himself in an utter dependence upon the mighty will of the Father ; and in that calm of thought his little cares, and they were many, faded like wreaths of steam cast abroad upon the air. To be sincere and loving and quiet, that was the ineffable secret ; not to scheme for fame, or influence or even for usefulness ; to receive as in a channel the strength and sweetness of God. 408 Beside Still Waters A bird hidden in a dark yew-tree began softly to flute, in that still afternoon, a little song that seemed like a prayer for bright days and leafy trees and embowered greenness; a prayer that should be certainly answered, and the fulfilment of which should be dearer for the delay. Hugh knew in that moment that the life he had lived and would live was, in its barreness and bleakness, its veiling cloud, its chilly airs, but the preface to some vast and glorious springtime of the spirit, when hill and valley should break together into sunlit bloom, when the trees should be clothed with leaf, when birds should sing clear for joy, and the soul should be utterly satisfied. The old poet had said that the saddest thing was to remem- ber happy days in hours of sorrow ; but to remember the dreary days in a season of calm content, what joy could be compared to that? His heart was slowly filled, as a cup with wine, with an unutterable hope ; but he desired no longer that some great thing should come to him, which should exalt him above his fellows and make him envied and admired. Rather should the humblest and the lowest place suf- fice, some corner of life which he should deck, and tend, and keep bright and sweet ; a few hands to grasp, a few hearts to encourage ; and The Dropping Veil 409 even so to do that with no set purpose, but by merely letting the gentle joy of the soul overflow, like a spring of brimming waters, fed from high hills of faith. And so, like a figure that passes down a cor- ridor and enters at an open door, Hugh passes from our sight. He mingles with his fellows, he goes to and fro, he speaks and he is silent, he smiles and weeps ; he may not be distinguished from other men, and there lies his best happiness, because he is waiting upon God. His life may be long or short ; he may mix with the crowd or sit solitary. If he dif- fers at all from others, it is in this, that he desires no costly thread of gold, no bright- hued skein that he may weave his texture of life. Upon that tapestry will be depicted no knight in shining armour; no nymphs with floating vestures, no paradise of bowers ; rather dim hills and cloud-hung valleys, and the dark- ness of haunted groves; with one figure of shadowy hue in sober raiment, walking ear- nestly as one that has a note of the way ; he would desire nothing but what may uphold him ; he would fear nothing but what may stain him; he would shun the company of none who need him ; he would clasp the hand of any gentle-hearted pilgrim. So would he walk 410 Beside Still Waters in quietness to the dim valley and the dark stream, believing that the Father has a place and a work and a joy for the smallest thing that His hands have made. THE END A Selection from the Catalogue of G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Complete Catalogues sent on application By ARTHUR C. BENSON ("T. B.") (Eighth Impression) From a College Window A collection of essays in which the reader is brought under the spell of a singularly interesting and attractive personality. The book is a frank outpouring of the author's intimate thoughts, a frank expression of what he prizes in life and what he expects from life. Mr. Benson's papers are character- ized by the intimacy of self-revelation and allusiveness and sense of overflow that belong to the familiar essay at its best " Mr. Benson has written nothing equal to this mellow and full-flavored book. From cover to cover it is packed with per- sonality; from phrase to phrase it reveals a thoroughly sincere and unaffected effort of self-expression; full-orbed and four- square, it is a piece of true and simple literature." London Chronicle, (Eighth Impression) The Upton Letters "A piece of real literature of the highest order, beautiful and fragrant. To review the book adequately is impossible. . . . It is in truth a precious thing." Week's Survey. "A book that we have read andjaggadJf only for the sake of its delicious flavor. There has Been nothing so good of its kind since the Etchingham Letters. The letters are beautiful, quiet, and wise, dealing with deep things in a dignified way." Christian Register. Crown 8vo. Each, $1.25 net. Q. P. PUTNAM'S SONS New York London Shelburne Essays By Paul Elmer More 4 vofs. Crown octavo. Sold separately. Net, $1.25. (By mail, $1.35) Contents FIRST SERIES : A Hermit's Notes on Thoreau The Soli- tude of Nathaniel Hawthorne The Origins of Haw- thorne and Poe The Influence of Emerson The Spirit of Carlyle The Science of English Verse Arthur Sympnds : The Two Illusions The Epic of Ireland Two Poets of the Irish Movement Tolstoy } or, The Ancient Feud between Philosophy and Art The Re- ligious Ground of Humanitarianism. SECOND SERIES : Elizabethan Sonnets Shakespeare's Son- nets Lafcadio Hearn The First Complete Edition of Hazlitt Charles Lamb Kipling and FitzGerald George Crabbe The Novels of George Meredith Hawthorne : Looking before and after Delphi and Greek Literature Nemesis ; or, The Divine Envy. THIRD SERIES : The Correspondence of William Cowper - Whittier the Poet The Centenary of Sainte-Beuve The Scotch Novels and Scotch History Swinburne- Christina Rossetti Why is Browning Popular? A Note on Byron's "Don Juan" Laurence Sterne J. Henry Shorthouse The Quest. FOURTH SERIES : The Vicar of Morwenstow Fanny Bur- ney A Note on " Daddy" Crisp George Herbert John Keats Benjamin Franklin Charles Lamb Again Walt Whitman William Blake The Letters of Horace Wai- pole The Theme of Paradise Lost. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES COLLEGE LIBRARY This book is due on the last date stamped below. x>k Slip-25m-9,'60 (.2,93684)4280 L 005 659 402 1 . $"/ College Library PQ U099 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACIL -....- J I III! II II I. A 001 165467 o