Beside Still Waters

XIII

Waiting for Light

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 society was interesting and enlivening. He had a little definite work to do, and he tried to cultivate 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 undergraduates, 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 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 quality of reality which his mind, when he was employed and full of schemes, often seemed to himself to lack. But, like all speculative people who spend much time in solitary thought, he seemed to himself very soon to cross the debateable ground in which people of definite religious views appeared to him to linger gladly. Here he left behind all the persons who depended upon systems. Here remained Roman Catholics, who depended chiefly upon the authority and tradition of the Church, and Protestants, depending no less blindly and complacently 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 fellow-pilgrims would be stricken down with some incurable malady, and through slow gradations of pain, sink wretchedly to death; was this suffering 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 terrible possibility that identity and personal consciousness were absolutely extinguished by death; for there was no sort of evidence to the contrary; and if this was the case, what remained of all human 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 certainty 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, introduced a new bewilderment upon the scene. A Romanist maintained the absolute divinity of the Church; a Protestant maintained the absolute reliability of the Bible; both of these could not be true, because in many points they contravened 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 any 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 – 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 happiness became impossible for Hugh, the happiness that comes of absolute certainty, when one may take a thing for granted, and not argue any more about it; that was the sort of happiness which many of his friends seemed to him to attain; and if life did indeed end with death, it was probably the best practical system 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 satisfying 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 beautiful 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, unresponsive 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 solitary trees; to his left, between grassy flood-banks, ran the straight reedy river, full to-day of the little yellow water-lily, golden stars rising 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 passionless 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

Dreariness – Romance – The Choice of Work – Dulness – A Creed

It was always a great pleasure to Hugh to explore 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 fatiguing, because one could taste the savour of a sight at one's ease. Hugh came to the conclusion, as life advanced, that he preferred a landscape on which humanity had set its mark to a landscape of a pure, natural wildness, though that 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 shrubberies, that one saw in a flash as the train 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 knowing that he must soon make haste to begone 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 tenderness and anxious love. There was always, too, a feeling in his mind of how easy, how sweet and tranquil, life would be under such conditions. 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 illusion, just as sorrows and miseries depicted in a book or in a drama appeared to have a romance about them which, seen from inside, 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 lived 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 having 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 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 possessed, 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 multiplication 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 real 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 administering faithfully an elaborate system; one of the most inspiring sights was an original man making 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, not directed to surprising or interesting others – that was the most vulgar expedient of all – but with a deliberate design to transmute, as by the touch of the magical stone, the common materials of life into pure gold. He would endeavour to discern the poetical quality in everything and in everyone. In inanimate things this was easy enough, for they were already full of pungent 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 conversational flies over the surface of the sleeping pool, in the hope that some impulse, some pleasant trait would dart irresistibly to the surface, and be hauled struggling ashore. Hugh had seen, more than once, strange, repressed, mournful things looking out of the guarded eyes of dreary persons; and it would be his business to entice these to the light. He determined, too, to cultivate the art of being alone. There were many people in the world who found themselves the poorest of all company, 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 universe 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 shuttered 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 innumerable wings; life was as full of bubbles, forming, rising into amber foam, as a glass of sparkling 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 temperate, so as to keep the inner eye unclouded; and he would try to be perfectly simple and 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 Epicureanism. But Hugh desired not to limit his gaze by the phenomena of life, but to keep his eyes fixed upon the further horizon; the light might dawn when it was least expected; but the best chance of catching the first faint lights of that other sunrise, was to have learnt expectancy, to have trained observation, and to have kept one's heart unfettered and undimmed.

He saw that the first essential of all was to group his life round a centre of some kind, 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 ability, year after year, who continued to put off the decision as to what their work should be, until they suddenly found themselves confronted with the necessity of earning their 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 uncongenial their life might be, they were incapable 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 interest 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 academical 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 of the results could one tolerate the mechanical labour inseparable from all intellectual toil. It was true that he had himself drifted into official 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 hardening 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, was the irresistible impulse to arise and go, which had come upon him when the process was completed. And now he was free, with an immense appetite for speculation, for intellectual pleasure, for the criticism of life, for observation. It was the quality, the fine essence of things and thoughts that mattered. To some was given the desire to organise and manage the world, to others the instinct for perception, for analysis, for the development of ideas. It was not that one kind of work was better than the other; both were needed, both were noble; but Hugh had no doubt on which side of the battle he was himself meant to fight. And so he determined that he would devote his life to the work, and that he would not allow any excessive intrusion of extraneous elements. The blessing of the academical life was that it entailed a certain amount of social intercourse; it compelled one to come into contact with a large variety of people. Without this Hugh felt that his outlook would have become narrow and self-centred. He knew of course that there would be times when it would seem to him that his life was an ineffective one, when he would envy the men of affairs, when he would wonder what, after all, his own performance amounted to. But Hugh felt that the great lack of many lives was the failure to perceive the interest of ideas; that many men and women went through existence in a dull and mechanical way, raking together the straws and dust of the street; and he thought that a man might do a great work if he could put a philosophy of life into an accessible shape. The great need was the need of simplification; the world was full of palpitating interests, of beauty, of sweetness, of delight. But many people had no criterion of values; they filled their lives with petty engagements, and smilingly lamented that they had no time to think or read. For such people the sun rose over dewy fields, in the freshness of the countryside, in vain: in vain the sunset glared among the empurpled cloud-banks; in vain the moon rose pale over the hushed garden-walks, while the nightingale, hidden in the dark heart of the bush, broke into passionate song. And even if it were argued that it was possible to be sensible and virtuous without being responsive to the appeal of nature, what did such people make of their social life? they made no excursions into the hearts and minds of others; their religion was a conventional thing; they went to concerts, where the violins thrilled with sweet passion, and the horns complained with a lazy richness, that they might chatter in gangways and nod to their friends. It was all so elaborate, so hollow! and yet in the minds of these buzzing, voluble persons one could generally discern a trickle of unconventional feeling, which could have made glad the sun-scorched pleasaunce.

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

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