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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.

And yet it was undeniable that the very sadness that he felt had a sweet fragrance about it. It was not the sadness of despair, but of hope unfulfilled. The soul clasped hands with the unknown, with tears of joy, and leaned out of the world as from a casement, on perilous seas. Indeed the very wealth of loveliness on every hand, and the mysterious yearning to take hold of it, to make it one's own, to draw it into the spirit, the hope that seemed at once so possible and yet so baffling, gave the key of the mystery. There was a beauty, there was a truth that was waiting for one, and the sweetness here was a type of the unseen. It was only the narrow soul that grudged if it was not satisfied. The brave heart went quietly and simply about its task, welcoming every delicate sight, every whisper of soft airs, every touch of loving hands, every glance of gentle eyes, rejoicing in the mystery of it all; thanking the Lord of life for the speechless wonder of it, and even daring to thank Him that the end was not yet; and that the bird must still speed onwards to the home of its heart, dipping its feet in the crest of the wandering wave, till the land, whither it was bound, should rise like a soft shadow over the horizon; till the shadow became a shape, and at last the tall cliffs, with the green downs above, the glittering plain, the sombre forest, loomed out above one, just beyond where the waves whitened on the loud sea-beaches, and the sound of the breakers came harmoniously over the waste of waters, like the soft tolling of a muffled bell.

XVIII
His Father's Death – Illness – A New Home – The New Light

Up to this time it may be said that Hugh had never felt the pressure of sordid anxieties, or experienced any sorrows but the sorrows of pure emotion. But now all at once there fell on him a series of heavy afflictions. His father died after a very short illness; so little had a fatal result been expected, that Hugh only reached home after his death. It happened that the last sight he had had of his father had been one of peculiar brightness. He had been staying at home, and, on the morning of his return to Cambridge, had gone into the study for a parting talk. He had found his father in a mood, not common with him, but which was growing commoner as he grew older, of serene cheerfulness. He had talked to Hugh very eagerly about a little book of poems that Hugh had lately published. Hugh had hardly mentioned it to his father beforehand, but he had dedicated the book to him, though he imagined that his father must consider poetry a dilettante kind of occupation. He was amazed to find, when he discussed the book with his father, that he was met with so vivid and personal a sympathy, that he discerned that the writing of poetry must have been a preoccupation of his father's in early days, one of those delicate ambitions on which he had sharply turned the key. His mother and sister were away for the day, so that when it was time to go, and the carriage was announced, there was no one but his father in the house. He had, as his custom was, laid his hand on his son's head, and blessed him with a deep emotion, adding a few words of love and confidence that had filled Hugh's eyes with tears; and his father had then put his arm through his son's, walked to the door with him, and had stood there in the bright morning, with his grey hair stirred by the wind, waving his hand till the carriage had turned the corner of the shrubbery.

Hugh often suffered from a certain apprehensiveness of mind on leaving home; he had sometimes wondered, as he said farewell to the group, whether he would see them thus again. But that morning it had never occurred to him that there was any such possibility in store for him; so that now, when he returned to the darkened house, and presently saw that pale, still form, with a quiet smile on the face, as of one satisfied beyond his dearest wish, he plunged into a depth of ineffectual sorrow such as he had never known before. The one thought that sustained him was that he and his father had loved, understood, and trusted each other. It was a horror to Hugh to think what his feelings might have been in the old days, if his father had died when his own predominant emotion had been a respectful fear of him.

It seemed impossible to believe that all the activities of that long life were over; and as Hugh went through his father's papers, with incessant little heart-broken griefs at the arrangements and precisions that had stood for so much devoted faithfulness and loyal responsibility, it seemed to him as though the door must open, and the well-known figure, with the smile that Hugh knew so well, stand before him.

The first disaster that was revealed to him was the smallness of his father's fortune; his father, though often talking about business to his son, had a curious reticence about money affairs, and had never prepared him for the scantiness of the provision that he had accumulated. Hugh saw at once that the utmost care would have for the future to be exercised, and that their whole scale of life must be altered. The fact was that his father's professional income had been ample, and that he had had a strong dislike to saving money from ecclesiastical sources. The home must evidently be broken up at once, and a small house taken for his mother. But fortunately both his mother and sister were entirely undismayed by this; their tastes were simple enough; but Hugh saw that he would have himself to contribute to their assistance. With his own small fortune, his literary work, and a little academical work that he was doing, he had been able to live comfortably enough without taking thought; but now he saw that all this must be curtailed. He had an intense dislike of thinking about money; and he therefore determined that there should be no small economies on his part, but that he would simply, if necessary, alter his easy scale of living.

It was a terrible process disestablishing the old home; the sale of furniture and books, the displacing of the old pictures, seemed to tear and rend all sorts of delicate fibres; but at last the house was dismantled, and it became a bitter sort of joy to leave a place that had become like a sad skeleton of one that he had loved. The trees, the flowers, the church-tower over the elms – as they drove away on that last morning, these seemed to regard him with mournful and hollow eyes; the parting was indeed so intensely sad, that Hugh experienced a grim relief in completing it; and there fell on him a deep dreariness of spirit, which seemed at last to benumb him, until he felt that he could no longer care for anything.

He returned at last to Cambridge; and now illness fell upon him for the second time in his life. Not a definite illness, but a lingering malaise, which seemed to bereave him of all spring and energy. He was told that he must not work, must spend his time in the open air, must be careful in matters of food and sleep. He lived indeed for some months the life of an invalid. The restrictions fretted him intolerably; but he found that every carelessness brought its swift revenge. He had previously felt little or no sympathy with invalids; he had disliked the signs of illness in others, the languor, the sunken eye, the fretfulness of fever, and now he had to bear them himself. He had always felt, half unconsciously, that illness was a fanciful thing, and might be avoided by a kind of cheerful effort. But now he had to go through the experience of feebleness and peevish inactivity. He used sometimes, out of pure irritability, to resume his work; but he had no grip or vigour; his conceptions were languid, his technical resources were dulled; and then came strange and unmanning dizzinesses, the horrible feeling, in the middle of a cheerful company, that one is hardly accountable for one's actions, when the only escape seems to be to hold on with all one's might to the slenderest thread of conventional thought. The difficulty was to know how to fill the time. There was no relish in company, and yet a hatred of solitude; he used to moon about, sit in the garden, take irresolute walks; he read novels, and found them unutterably dreary. Music was the only thing that lifted him out of his causeless depression, and gave back a little zest to life; but the fear that was almost intolerable was the possibility that he would never emerge out of this wretchedness. Day after day passed, and no change was apparent; till just when he was on the verge of despair, when the darkest visions began to haunt his mind, the cloud began to lift. He found that he could work a little, though the smallest excess was still punished by days of feebleness. But, holding to this thread of hope, Hugh climbed slowly out of the darkness; and it was a day to him of deep and abiding gratitude when, after a long Swiss holiday, in which his bodily activity had come back to him with an intensity of pleasure, Hugh realised that he was again in his ordinary health.

But he had at this time a bitter disappointment. Just before his father's death he had finished preparing a little work for publication, a set of essays on a variety of subjects, to which he had devoted much care and thought. To his deep vexation it met with a very contemptuous reception. Its errors were mercilessly criticised, and it was proclaimed to be the work of a sickly, sentimental dilettante. Hugh found it hard to believe in the verdict; but his conviction was established by the opinion of one of his old friends who, as kindly as possible, pointed out that the book was both thin and egotistical. Hugh felt as if he could never write again, and as if the chief occupation of his life would be gone; but with renewed health his confidence returned, and in a few weeks he was able to look the situation in the face. The reception of the book had brought home to him the direction in which he was drifting. He saw that a certain toughness and hardness of fibre had been wanting. He saw that he had tried to fill a book up out of his own mind, in a leisurely and trifling mood. He had not attempted to grasp his subjects, but had allowed himself to put down loose and half-hearted impressions, instead of trying to see into the essence of the things he was describing.

But, his illness over, he was astonished to find how little both money anxieties and the shattering of literary hopes distressed him. For the first, it was clear that his mother and sister could live with an adequate degree of comfort and dignity. And as for his literary hopes, he realised that the failure had been a real revelation of his own weakness; but he realised too that other people would forget about the book still faster than he himself, and that no previous failures would damn a further work, if only it possessed the true qualities of art; and indeed from this time he dated a real increase of artistic faculty, a sense of constraining vocation, a joy in literary labour, which soon, like a sunrise, brightened all his horizon; and it was pleasant too, though Hugh did not overvalue it, to find his work beginning to bring him a definite, though slight reputation, and a position among imaginative critics.

Moreover his new home began to have a very potent charm for him. His mother had settled in a small ancient house in the depths of the country. They had very few neighbours. The little building itself was full of charm, the charm of mellow beauty and old human ownership; it was embosomed among trees, and had a small walled garden, rich in flowers and shade. He had been there but a few weeks, when he realised that the old feeling of a vague friendliness and intimate concern with nature had come back. It was as though the spirits, which had peopled the remembered flowers and trees of his first home, had flitted with them, and had taken up their abode in this other garden. The flowers seemed to smile at him with the same shy mystery, the trees to surround the house like a troop of loyal sentinels. The absence of the constant social interruptions that had been characteristic of the Rectory was an added charm; his mother and sister, too, though heavily overshadowed by grief, found the place peaceful and congenial; and the best joy of all was the sweet and fragrant relation that sprung up among the three. They were like the survivors of a wreck, whose former familiarity had been converted suddenly into a deep and emotional loyalty, by the sad experiences through which they had passed together. The relations had before been affectionate, but in some ways superficial. Hugh to his surprise found himself daily making discoveries about his mother and sister, through the close relationship into which they were brought. Unsuspected tastes and feelings revealed themselves, and he began to be aware of a whole host of new interests that sprang up between them. Sometimes, when a hedgerow is rooted up, one may notice how a whole crop of unknown flowers, whose seeds had been buried deep in the soil, suddenly emerge to conceal the bare scarred ditch. Hugh thought to himself that the experiences through which they had passed had had this effect of enlarging and extending sympathies which were there all the time, and which had never had an opportunity of revealing themselves. And thus, out of sorrow and wretchedness, there sprang to light a whole range of new forces, a vision of new possibilities. It seemed to Hugh that he was like a man who had passed by night through an unfamiliar country, by unknown roads; that as the darkness had begun to glimmer to dawn, the shapeless shadows of things about him had gradually taken shape, and revealed themselves at last to be but the quiet trees with their gentle tapestry of leaves, leaning over his way; and what had been but a formless horror, became revealed as a company of friendly living things that beckoned comfortably to his spirit, and grew into purer colour as the dawn began to break from underground.

XIX
Women – The Feminine View – Society – Frank Relations – Coldness – Sensitiveness

Hugh had always felt that he had very little comprehension of the feminine temperament; he realised to the full how much more generous, unselfish, high-minded, and sympathetic women were than men, their perceptions of personalities more subtle, their intuitions more delicate; in a difficult matter, a crisis involving the relations of people, when it was hard to know how to act, and when, in dealing with the situation, tact and judgment were required, he found it a good rule to consult a woman about what had happened, and a man about what would happen. Women had as a rule a finer instinct about characters and motives, but their advice about how to act was generally too vehement and rash; a woman could often divine the complexities of a situation better, a man could advise one better how to proceed. But what he could seldom follow was the intellectual processes of women; they intermingled too much of emotion with their logic; they made birdlike, darting movements from point to point, instead of following the track; they tended to be partisans. They forgave nothing in those they disliked; they condoned anything in those they loved. Hugh lived so much himself in the intellectual region, and desired so constantly a certain equable and direct quality in his relations with others, that he seldom felt at ease in his relations with women, except with those who could give him the sort of sisterly camaraderie that he desired. Women seemed to him to have, as a rule, a curious desire for influence, for personal power; they translated everything into personal values; they desired to dominate situations, to have their own way in superficial matters, to have secret understandings. They acted, he thought, as a rule, from personal and emotional motives; and thus Hugh, who above all things desired to live by instinct rather than by impulse, found himself fretted and entangled in a fine network of shadowy loyalties, exacting chivalries, subtle diplomacies, delicate jealousies, unaccountable irritabilities, if he endeavoured to form a friendship with a woman. A normal man took a friendship just as it came, exacted neither attendance nor communication, welcomed opportunities of intercourse, but did not scheme for them, was not hurt by apparent neglect, demanded no effusiveness, and disliked sentiment. Hugh, as he grew older, did not desire very close relationships with people; he valued frankness above intimacy, and candour above sympathy. He found as a rule that women gave too much sympathy, and the result was that he felt himself encouraged to be egotistical. He used to think that when he spoke frankly to women, they tended to express admiration for the way he had acted or thought; and if he met that by saying that he neither deserved or wanted praise, he received further admiration for disinterestedness, when all that he desired was to take the matter out of the region of credit altogether. He believed indeed that women valued the pleasure of making an impression, of exercising influence, too highly, and that in this point their perception seemed to fail; they did not understand that a man acts very often from impersonal motives, and is interested in the doing of the thing itself, whatever it may happen to be, rather than in the effect that his action may have upon other people. It was part of the high-mindedness of women that they could not understand that a man should be so absorbed in the practical execution of a matter. They looked upon men's ambitions, their desire to do or make something – a book, a picture, a poem – as a sort of game in which they could not believe that any one could be seriously interested. Hugh indeed seemed to divine the curious fact that, generally speaking, men and women looked upon the preoccupations and employments of the opposite sex as rather childish; a man would be immersed in practical activities, in business, in organisation, in education, in communicating definite knowledge, in writing books, in attending meetings – this he thought to be the serious and real business of the world; and he was inclined to look upon relationships with other people, sentiment, tender affections, wistful thoughts of others, as a sort of fireside amusement and recreation.

Women, on the other hand, found their real life in these things, desired to please, to win and retain affection, to admire and to be admired, to love and be loved; and they tended to look upon material things – comfort, wealth, business, work, art – as essentially secondary things, which had of course a certain value, but which were not to be weighed in the scale with emotional things. There were naturally many exceptions to this; there were hard, business-like, practical women; there were emotional, tender-hearted, sensitive men; but the general principle held good. And thus it was that men and women regarded the supreme emotion of love from such different points of view, and failed so often to comprehend the way in which the opposite sex regarded it; to women it was but the natural climax, the raising and heightening of their habitual mood into one great momentous passion; it was the flower of life slowly matured into bloom; to men it was more a surprising and tremendous experience, an amazing episode, cutting across life and interrupting its habitual current, contradicting rather than confirming their previous experience.

Hugh was himself rather on the feminine side: though he had a strong practical turn, and could carry through a matter effectively enough, yet he valued delicate and sincere emotions, disinterestedness, simplicity, and loyalty, above practical activity and organisation; the result of this, he supposed, was that he tended, from a sense of the refreshment of contrast, to make his friends rather among men than among women, and this was, he believed, the reason why he had never fallen frankly in love, because he could to a great extent supply out of his own nature the elements which as a rule men sought among women; and because the complexity and sensitiveness of his own temperament took refuge rather in tranquillity and straight-forward commonsense. As he grew older, as he became absorbed more and more in literary work, he tended, he thought, to draw more and more away from human relationships; the energy, the interest, that had formerly gone into making new relationships now began to run in a narrower channel. Whether it was prudent to yield to this impulse he did not stop to inquire. It seemed to him that many of his friends wasted a great deal of force and activity from semi-prudential motives. As his life became more solitary, an old friend once took him to task on this point. He said that it was all very well for a time, but that Hugh would find his interest in his work flag, and that there would be nothing to fill the gap. He advised him, at the cost of some inconvenience, to cultivate relations with a wider circle, to go to social gatherings, to make acquaintances. He knew, he said, that Hugh would possibly find it rather tiresome, but it was of the nature of an investment which might some day prove of value.

Hugh replied that he thought that this was living life too much on the principle of the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass. The White Knight kept a mouse-trap slung to his saddle; when it was objected that he would not be likely to find mice on the back of his horse, he replied that perhaps it was not likely, but that if they were there, he did not choose to have them running about. Hugh confessed that he did find ordinary society tiresome; but to persist in frequenting it, on the chance that some day it would turn out to be a method of filling up vacant hours, seemed to him to be providing against an unlikely contingency, and indeed an ugly and commercial business. He did not think it probable that he would lose interest in his work, and he thought it better to devote himself to it while it interested him. If the time ever came when he needed a new set of relationships, he thought he could trust himself to form them; and if he did not desire to form them, well, to be bored was bad enough, but it was better on the whole to be passively rather than to be actively bored.

But Hugh's theory in reality went deeper than that. He had a strong belief, which grew in intensity with age, that the only chance of realising one's true life was to do something that interested one with all one's might. He did not believe that what was done purely from a sense of duty, unless it pleased and satisfied some part of one's nature, was ever effective or even useful. It was not well done, and it was neglected on any excuse. His pilgrimage through the world presented itself to Hugh in the light of a journey through hilly country. The ridge that rose in front of one concealed a definite type of scenery; that scenery was there; there were indeed a hundred possibilities about it, and the imagination might amuse itself by forecasting what it was to be like. But it seemed to Hugh that one wasted time in these forecasts; and that it was better to wait and see what it actually was, and then to enjoy it as vigorously as one could. To spend one's time in fantastic speculation as to what was coming, was to waste vigour and thought, which were better employed in observing and interpreting what was around one.

And so Hugh resolved that his relations with others should be of this kind; that he would not seek restlessly for particular kinds of friendships; but that he would accept the circle that he found, the persons with whom relations were inevitable; and that he would make the most of what he found. Choice and selection! How little one really employed them! the world streamed past one, an unsuspected, unlooked-for friend would suddenly emerge from the throng, and one would find oneself journeying shoulder to shoulder for a space. Hugh thought indeed sometimes that one made no friendships at all of oneself; but that God sent the influences of which one had need, at the very time at which one needed them, and then silently and tenderly withdrew them again for a time, when they had done their work for the soul. One received much, and perhaps, however unconsciously, however lightly, one gave something of one's own as well.

But all Hugh's relations with others were overshadowed by the great doubt, which was perhaps the heaviest burden he had to carry, as to whether one's individuality endured. The thought that it might not survive death, made him shrink back from establishing a closeness of emotional dependence on another, the loss of which would be intolerable. The natural flame of the heart seemed quenched and baffled by that cold thought. It was the same instinct that made him, as a boy, refuse the gift of a dog, when a pet collie, that had been his own, had been killed by an accident. The pain of the loss had seemed so acute, so irreparable, that he preferred to live uncomforted rather than face such another parting; and there seemed, too, a kind of treachery in replacing love. If, on the other hand, individuality did endure, the best of all relationships seemed to Hugh a frank and sincere companionship, such as may arise between two wayfarers whose road lies together for a little, and who talk easily and familiarly as they walk in the clear light of the dawn. Hugh felt that there was an abundance of fellow-pilgrims, men and women alike, to consort with, to admire, to love; this affability and accessibility made it always easy for Hugh to enter into close relationship with others. He had little desire to guard his heart; and the sacred intimacy, the sharing of secret thoughts and hopes, which men as a rule give but to a few, Hugh was perhaps too ready to give to all. What he lost in depth and intensity he perhaps gained in breadth. But he also became aware that he had a certain coldness of temperament. Many were dear to him, but none essential. There was no jealousy about his relations with others. He never demanded of a friend that he should give him a special or peculiar regard. His frankness was indeed sometimes misunderstood, and people occasionally supposed that they had evoked a nearness of feeling, an impassioned quality, which was not really there. "You give away your heart in handfuls," said a friend to him once in a paroxysm of anger, fancying himself neglected; and Hugh felt that it was both just and unjust. He had never, he thought, given his heart away at all, except as a boy to his chosen friend. But he gave a smiling and tender affection very easily to all who seemed to desire it. He knew indeed from that first experience something of the sweet mystery of faithful devotion; but now he could only idealise, he could not idolise. The world was full of friendly, gracious, interesting people. Circumstance spun one to and fro among the groups and companies; how could one give a unique regard, when there were so many that claimed allegiance and admiration? He saw others flit from passion to passion, from friendship to friendship – Hugh's aim was rather to be the same, to be loyal and true, to be able to take up a suspended friendship where he had laid it down; the most shameful thing in the world seemed to him the ebbing away of vitality out of a relationship; and therefore he would not give pledges which he might be unable to redeem. If the conscious soul survived mortal death, then perhaps these limitations of time and space, which suspended friendships, would exist no longer, and he could wait for that with a quiet hopefulness. But if it all passed away, and was as though it had never been, if life was but a leaping flame, a ripple on the stream, then how could one have the heart to tie indissoluble links?