Beside Still Waters

XV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XVI

Humanity – Individuality – The Average

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XVII

Spring – Wonder

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