Beside Still Waters

XXIV

The Romance of Life – The Renewal of Youth – Youth

There were some days when the whole air of the place, the houses, the fields, the gardens, even the very people that Hugh met in the streets, seemed to be full of romance and poetry. There was no particular quality about the days themselves, that Hugh could ever divine, that produced this impression. Perhaps such moods came oftener and more poignantly when the air was cool and fresh, when the temperate sun filled his low rooms from end to end, lay serene upon the pastures, or danced in the ripples of the stream. But the mood came just as inevitably on dull days, when the sky was roofed with high grey clouds, or even on raw days of winter, when fitful gusts whirled round corners, and when the spouts and cornices dripped with slow rains. In these hours the whole world seemed possessed by some gracious and sweet mystery; everything was in the secret, everything was included in the eager and high-hearted conspiracy. It was all the same, on such days, whether Hugh was alone or with company; if he was among friends or even strangers, they seemed to look upon him, to speak, to move, with a blithe significance; he seemed to intercept tender messages in a casual glance, to experience the sense of a delighted goodwill, such as reigns among a party of friends on an expedition of pleasure. This mood did not produce in Hugh the sense of merriment or high spirits; it was not an excited frame of mind; it was rather a feeling of widespread tenderness, a sort of brotherly admiration. At such moments, the most crabbed and peevish person seemed to be transfigured, to be acting a delightful part for the pleasure of a spectator, and an inner benevolence, a desire to contribute zest and amusement to the banquet of life, seemed to underlie the most fractious gestures or irritable speech. On such days, one seemed to have an affectionate understanding with even slight acquaintances, an understanding which seemed to say, "We are all comrades in heart, and nothing but circumstance and bodily limitation prevents us from being comrades in life." Hugh used to fancy that this mood was like an earnest of the bodiless joy, the free companionship of heaven, if such a place there were, where one should know even as one was known, and be able to enter in and possess, in a flash of thought, the whole fabric of a fellow-creature's soul.

And then if Hugh spent such a day alone, his thoughts seemed to have the same enlightening and invigorating quality. He did not fumble among dreary details, but saw swiftly into the essence of things, so that he smiled as he sate. A book would, on such occasions, touch into life a whole train of pretty thoughts, as a spark leaps along a scattered line of gunpowder. A few remembered lines of poetry, a few notes played by unseen hands on a musical instrument, from a window that he passed in the street, would give a sense of completed happiness; so that one said, "Yes, it is like that!" The palings of gardens, the screen of shrubs through which the pleasaunce could be dimly discerned within, the high trees holding up their branches to the air, all half guarded, half revealed the same jocund secret. Here, by a hedgerow, in a lane, Hugh would discern the beady eye of a fat thrush which hopped in the tall grass, or plied some tiny business among the stems, lifting his head at intervals to look briskly round. "I see you!" said Hugh, as he used to say long ago to the birds in the Rectory garden, and the bird seemed almost to nod his head in reply.

And then, too, the houses that he passed all breathed the same air of romance. There, perhaps, behind the wall or at the open window, sat or moved the one friend of whom he was ever in search; but on these days it mattered little that he had not found him; he could wait, he could be faithful, and Hugh could wait too, until the day when all things should be made new. If he walked on days like these through some college court, the thought of the happy, careless, cheerful lives, lived there in strength and brightness, by generation after generation of merry young men, filled Hugh's heart with content; he liked to think that all the world over, in busy offices, in grave parlours, in pleasant parsonages, there were serious, commonplace, well-occupied men, who perhaps, in a tiny flash of memory, sent back a wistful thought to the old walls and gables, the towns with their chiming bells, and remembered tenderly the days of their blithe youth, the old companions, the lively hours. The whole world seemed knit together by sweet and gentle ties: labour and strife mattered little; it was but a cloud upon the path, and would melt into the sunlit air at last.

Hugh used to feel half amused at the irrepressible sense of youth which thrilled him still. As a boy, he had little suspected that the serious elderly men, of settled habits and close-shaved chins, had any such thoughts as these under their battered exteriors. He had thought that such persons were necessarily stolid and comfortable persons, believing in committees and correspondence, fond of food and drink, careful of their balance at the bank, and rather disgusted at than tolerant of the irrepressible levity and flightiness of youth. Yet now that he himself was approaching middle age, he was conscious, not indeed of increased levity or high spirits, but of undiminished vigour, wider sympathy, larger joy. Life was not only not less interesting, but it seemed rather to thrill and pulsate with fresh and delightful emotion. If he could not taste it with the same insouciance, it was only because he perceived its quality more poignantly. If life were less full of laughter, it was only because there were sweeter and more joyful things to enjoy. What was best of all about this later delight, was that it left no bitter taste behind it; in youth, a day of abandonment to elation, a day of breezy talk, hearty laughter, active pleasure, would often leave a sense of flatness and dissatisfaction behind it; but the later joy had no sort of weariness as its shadow; it left one invigorated and hopeful.

The most marked difference of all was in one's relations with others. In youth a new friendship had been a kind of excited capture; it had been shadowed by jealousy; it had been a desire for possession. One had not been content unless one had been sure that one's friend had the same sort of unique regard that one experienced oneself. One had resented his other friendships, and wished to supersede them. But now Hugh had no such feeling. He had no desire to make a relationship, because the relationship seemed already there. If one met a sympathetic and congenial person, one made, as it were, a sort of sunlit excursion in a new and pleasing country. One admired the prospects, surveyed the contours. In old days, one had desired to establish a kind of fortress in the centre, and claim the fruitful land for one's own.

Of course, in Hugh's dealings with the youthful persons whom he encountered in his Cambridge life, he became aware of the existence of the subtle barrier which is erected between youth and middle age; he was conscious often that the delightful egotism of youth has, as a rule, very little deference for, or interest in, the opinions of older persons. Youth is so profoundly absorbed in its own visions, that it is very rarely curious about the duller reveries of older people. It regards them as necessarily dreary, grey, wise, and prudent. The only thing it values is sympathy for itself, just as a child is far more interested in the few chords which it can strum on a piano than in the richest performance of a maestro. But Hugh did not find this to be disagreeable, because he was less and less concerned about the effect he produced. He had found out that the joys of perception are at least equal to the joys of expression. Youth cannot wait, it must utter its half-formed wishes, put out its crude fruits; and it used to seem to Hugh that one of the most pathetic and beautiful things in the world was the intensity of feeling, the limitless dreams, that rose shadowily in a boy's mind side by side with the inarticulateness, the failure to command any medium of expression. One of the reasons why young and clever men are so desperately anxious to be amusing and humorous, is because they desire above all things to see the effect of their words, and long to convulse an audience; while they lack, as a rule, the practised delicacy, the finished economy in which humour, to be effective, must be clothed.

But, after all, what brought Hugh the best comfort, was the discovery that advancing years did not bring with them any lack of sensitiveness, any dreariness, any sense of dulness. It was indeed rather the reverse. The whole fabric of life was richer, more impassioned, more desirable than he had ever supposed. In youth, emotion and feeling had seemed to him like oases in a desert, oases which one had to quit, when one crossed the threshold of life, to plod wearily among endless sands. But now he had found that the desert had a life, an emotion, a beauty of its own, and the oases of youthful fancy seemed to be tame and limited by comparison. Hugh still thought with a shudder of old age, which lay ahead of him; but even as he shuddered, he began to wonder whether that too would not open up to him a whole range of experiences and emotions, of which to-day he had no inkling at all. Would life perhaps seem richer still? That was what he dared to hope. Meanwhile he would neither linger nor make haste: he would not catch at the past as containing a lost and faded sweetness; neither would he anticipate, so far as he could help it, the closing of the windows of the soul.

XXV

A Narrow Path – A Letter – Asceticism – The Narrow Soul

One morning when he was sitting in his rooms at Cambridge, Hugh heard a knock at the door; there presently entered a clergyman, whom at first sight Hugh thought to be a stranger, but whom he almost immediately recognised as an old school-fellow, called Ralph Maitland, whom he had not seen for more than twenty years. Maitland had been an idle, good-humoured boy, full of ideas, a great reader and a voluble talker. Hugh had never known him particularly well; but he remembered to have heard that Maitland had fallen under religious impulses at Oxford, had become serious, had been ordained, and had eventually become a devoted and hard-working clergyman in a northern manufacturing town. He had been lately threatened with a break-down in health, and had been ordered abroad; he had come to Cambridge to see some friends, and hearing that Hugh was in residence there, had called upon him. Hugh was very much interested to see him, and gradually began to discern the smooth-faced boy he had known, under the worn and hard-featured mask of the priest. They spent most of that day together, and went out for a long walk. Hugh thought he perceived a touch of fanaticism about Maitland, who found it difficult to talk except on matters connected with his parish. But eventually he began to talk of the religious life, and Hugh gradually perceived that Maitland held a very ardent and almost fierce view of the priestly vocation; he drew a picture of the joys of mortification and self-denial, which impressed Hugh, partly because of its intensity, and partly also from an uneasy sense of strain and self-consciousness which it gave him. Maitland's idea seemed to be that all impulses, except the religious impulse in its narrowest sense, needed to be sternly repressed; that the highest life was a severe detachment from all earthly things; that the Christian pilgrim marched along a very narrow way, bristling with pitfalls both of opinion and practice; that the way was defined, hazily by Scripture and precisely by the Church, along which the believer must advance; "Few there be that find it!" said Maitland, with a kind of menacing joy. He was full of the errors of other sects and communions. The Roman doctrine was over-developed, not primitive enough; the Protestant nonconformists were neglectful of ecclesiastical ordinances. The only people, it seemed, who were in the right path were a small band of rather rigid Anglicans, who appeared to Maitland to be the precise type of humanity that Christ had desired to develop.

As he spoke, his eye became bright, his lip intolerant, and Hugh was haunted by the text, "The zeal of Thine house hath ever eaten me." Maitland seemed to be literally devoured by an idea, which, like the fox in the old story of the Spartan boy, appeared to prey on his vitals. Hugh became gradually nettled by the argument, but he was no match for Maitland in scholastic disputation. Maitland felled his arguments with an armoury of texts, which he used like cudgels. Hugh at last said that what he thought was the weak point in Maitland's argument was this – that in every sect and every church there were certainly people who held with the same inflexible determination to the belief that they were absolutely in the right, and had unique possession of the exact faith delivered to the saints; and that each of these persons would be able to justify themselves by a rigid application of texts. Hugh said that it seemed to him to be practically certain that no one of them was infallibly in the right, and that the truth probably lay in certain wide religious ideas which underlay all forms of Christian faith. Maitland rejected this with scorn as a dangerous and nebulous kind of religion – "nerveless and flabby, without bone or sinew." They then diverged on to a wider ground, and Hugh tried to defend his theory that God called souls to Himself by an infinite variety of appeal, and that the contest was not between orthodoxy on the one hand and heterodoxy on the other, but between pure and unselfish emotion on the one hand and hard and self-centred materialism on the other. To this Maitland replied by saying that such vagueness was one of the darkest temptations that beset cultured and intellectual people, and that the duty of a Christian was to follow precise and accurate religious truth, as revealed in Scripture and interpreted by the Church, however much reason and indolence revolted from the conclusions he was forced to draw. They parted, however, in a very friendly way, and pledged themselves to meet again and continue their discussion on Maitland's return.

A few days afterwards Hugh was surprised to receive a letter from Maitland from Paris which ran as follows: —

"MY DEAR NEVILLE, – It was a great pleasure to see you and to revive the memories of old days. I have thought a good deal over our conversation, and have made up my mind that I ought to write to you. But first let me ask your pardon, if in the heat of argument I allowed my zeal to outrun my courtesy. I was over-tired and over-strained, and in the mood when any opposition to one's own cherished ideals is deeply and perhaps unreasonably distressing.

"You seemed to me – I will freely grant this – to be a real and candid seeker after truth; but the sheltered and easy life that you have led disguises from you the urgency of the struggle. If you had wrestled as I have for years with infidelity and wickedness, and had seen, as I have a thousand times, how any laxity of doctrinal opinion is always visited upon its victim by a corresponding laxity of moral action, you would feel very differently.

"I think you are treading a very dangerous path. To me it is clear that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in His recorded utterances, in a world of incredible wickedness and vague speculation, deliberately narrowed the issues of life and death. He originated a society, to which He promised the guidance of the Spirit, and woe to the man who tries to find a religion outside of that Church.

"You seem to me, if you will forgive the expression, to be more than half a Pagan; to put Christianity on a level – though you allow it a certain pre-eminence – with other refining influences. You spoke of art and poetry as if they could bring men to God, and that in spite of the fact that, as I reminded you, there is not a syllable in our Lord's words that could be construed into the least sympathy with art or poetry at all. You called yourself a Christian, and I have no doubt that you sincerely believe yourself to be one; but to me you seemed to be more like one of those, cultured Greeks who gave St. Paul an interested hearing on the Acropolis. And yet you seemed to me so genuinely anxious to do what was right, that I am going to ask you, faithfully and sincerely, to reconsider your position. You are drifting into a kind of vague and epicurean optimism. You spoke of the message of God through nature; there is no direct message through that channel, it is only symbolical of the inner divine processes.

"I am not going to argue with you; but I implore you to give some time to a careful study of the New Testament and the Fathers. I feel sure that light will be sent you. Pray earnestly for it, if you have not, as I more than half suspect, given up prayer in favour of a vague aspiration. And be sure of this, that I shall not forget you in my own prayers. I shall offer the Holy Sacrifice in your intention; I shall make humble intercession for you, for you seem to me to be so near the truth and yet so far away. Forgive my writing thus, but I feel called upon to warn you of what is painfully clear to me. – Believe me, ever sincerely yours,

"RALPH MAITLAND"

This letter touched Hugh very much with a kind of melancholy pathos. He contented himself with writing back that he did indeed, he believed, desire to see the truth, and that he deeply appreciated Maitland's sympathy and interest.

"No impulse of the heart, on behalf of another, is ever thrown away, I am sure of that. But you would be the first to confess, I know, that a man must advance by whatever light he has; that no good can come of accepting the conclusions of another, if the heart and mind do not sincerely assent; and that if I differ from yourself as to the precise degree of certainty attainable in religious matters, it is not because I despise the Spirit, but because I think that I discern a wider influence than you can admit."

He received in reply a short note to say that Maitland felt that Hugh was making the mistake of trusting more to reason than to divine guidance, but adding that he would not cease to pray for him day by day.

Hugh reflected long and seriously over this strange episode; but he did not experience the smallest temptation to desert a rational process of inquiry. He read the Gospels again, and they seemed to confirm him in his belief that a wide and simple view of life was there indicated. He seemed to see that the spirit which Christ inculcated was a kind of mystical uplifting of the heart to God, not a doctrinal apprehension of His nature. It seemed indeed to him that Christ's treatment of life was profoundly poetical, that it tended to point men to the aim of discerning a beautiful quality in action and life. Those delicate and moving stories that He told – how little they dealt with sacramental processes or ecclesiastical systems! They rather expressed a vivid and ardent interest in the simplest emotions of life. They taught one to be humble, forgiving, sincere, honest, affectionate; there was, it was true, an absence of intellectual and artistic appeal in them, though there were parables, like the parable of the talents, which seemed to point to the duty of exercising faithfully a diversity of gifts; but it was not, Hugh thought, due to a want of sympathy with the things of the mind, but seemed to arise from an intense and burning desire to prove that the secret lay rather in one's relations to humanity, and even to nature, than in one's intellectual processes and conceptions.

And then as to the point that Christ enforced upon men a fierce ideal of mortification and self-denial, Hugh could see no trace of it. Christ did not turn his back upon the world; He loved and enjoyed beautiful sights and sounds, such as birds and flowers. He did indeed clearly assert that one must not be at the mercy of material conditions, and that it was the privilege of man to live among the things of the soul. It was the path of simplicity, not the path of asceticism, that was indicated. Christ seemed to Hugh to be entirely preoccupied with one idea – that love was the strongest and most beautiful thing in the world; and that if one recognised that love alone could be victorious over evil and pain and death, one might be certain that its source and origin lay deepest of all in the vast heart of God, however sadly and strangely that seemed to be contradicted by actual experience. And so Hugh felt that whatever befell him, he would not be persuaded to desert the broad highway of love and beauty and truth, for the narrow and muddy alley of ecclesiastical opinion. The kingdom of God seemed to him to have suffered more disastrous violence from the hands of bigoted ecclesiastics than it had ever suffered from the onslaughts of the world. Ecclesiastics polluted the crystal stream at its very source by confining the river of life to a small and crooked channel. Hugh prayed with all his heart that he might escape from any system that led him to judge others harshly, to condemn their beliefs, to define their errors. That seemed to him to be the one spirit against which the Saviour had uttered denunciations of an almost appalling sternness. The Lord's Prayer and not the Athanasian Creed seemed to him to sum up the essential spirit of Christ. He believed himself to be following the will of God in yielding to every emotional impulse that made life more sacred, more beautiful, more tender, more hopeful. He believed himself, no less sincerely, to be slighting and despising the tender love of God for all the sheep of His hand, when he made religion into either a subtle and metaphysical thing on the one hand, or a conventional and ceremonious business on the other. The peace that the world cannot give – how desirable, how remote that seemed! How large and free a quality it was! But the peace promised him by his friend seemed to him the apathy of a soul crushed and confined in the narrowest of dungeons, and denying the existence of the free air and the sun because of the streaming walls and shapen stones which hemmed it round.

XXVI

Activity – Work – Isolation

Hugh went once to spend a few days with an old friend who had held an important living in a big country town. It was a somewhat bewildering experience. His friend was what would be called a practical person, and loved organisation – the word was often on his lips – with a consuming passion. Hugh saw that he was a very happy man; he was a big fellow, with a sanguine complexion and a resonant voice. He was always in high spirits: he banged doors behind him, and when he hurried upstairs, the whole house seemed to shake. Every moment of his day was full to the brim of occupation. He could be heard shouting directions in the garden and stables at an early hour; he received and wrote a great many letters; he attended many committees and meetings. He hurried about the country, he made speeches, he preached. Hugh heard one of his sermons, which was delivered with abundant geniality. It consisted of a somewhat obvious paraphrase of a Scripture scene – the slaughter of the prophets of Baal by Elijah. The preacher described the ugly carnage with much gusto. He then invited his hearers to stamp out evil with similar vigour, and ended with drawing a highly optimistic picture of the world, representing evil and sin as a kind of skulking and lingering contagion, which God was doing His best to get rid of, and which was indeed only kept alive by the foolish perversity of a few abandoned persons, and would soon be extirpated altogether if only enough committees would meet and take the thing up in a businesslike way. It was in a sense a vigorous performance, and Hugh thought that though there was little attempt to bind up the broken-hearted, yet he could conceive its having an inspiriting effect on people who felt themselves on the right side.

His friend found time one evening, as they sat smoking together, to inquire into Hugh's occupations, and read him a friendly lecture on the subject of making himself more useful. Hugh felt that it was useless to argue the question; but when he came away, somewhat dizzied and wearied by the tumultuous energy of his friend's life, he found himself wondering exactly how much resulted from this buzzing and humming organisation. There was not a marked difference between his friend's parish and other parishes, except that there were certainly more meetings. Hugh had indeed an uneasy sense that a man with less taste for organisation, and more leisure for pastoral intercourse with his flock, might have effected more. The vicar's chief concern indeed seemed to be with the prosperous and healthy members of his parish; if there was a case of destitution, of illness, of sorrow, it was certainly inquired into; some hard-featured lady, with a strong sense of rectitude and usefulness, would be commissioned to go and look into the matter. She generally returned saying cheerfully that she had put things straight, and that it turned out to be all their own fault.