Chapter 11

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?

Hugh half understood that the weakness of his case was that he could argue about it at all. Others went blindly and ardently into loves and friendships, because an irresistible impulse carried them away--with Hugh the impulse was not irresistible. Meanwhile he would give what he could, offer rather than claim; he would reject no proffer of friendship, but he would not, or perhaps he could not, fetter himself with the heavy chains of emotion. But even so he was aware that this temperance, this balance of nature, was not a wholly beautiful or desirable thing.

The perception of this came home to Hugh with peculiar force on a bright fresh day of early spring, when he walked with a friend in the broad green fields beside the Cam. They had been strolling first in the college gardens, where the snowdrops were pushing up, some of them bearing on their heads the crust of earth that had sheltered them; crocuses rose in the borders, like little bursts of flame. A thrush was singing on a high bough, and seemed to be telling, in an eager mystery, the very hopes and dreams of Hugh's heart. He said something that implied as much to his friend, who replied that he did not understand that.

This friend of Hugh's was much younger than himself, a fastidious and somewhat secluded nature, but possessing for Hugh the deep attraction of a peculiar type of character. He had great critical and literary gifts, and seemed to Hugh to bring to the judgment of artistic work an extraordinarily clear and fine criterion of values. But beside this, he seemed to Hugh to have the power of entering into a very close and emotional relationship with people; and out in the meadows where the sun shone bright, the breeze blew soft, and the first daisies showed their heads among the grass, Hugh asked him to explain what he felt about his relationship with others. His friend said that it came to this, that it was the only real and vital thing in the world; and when Hugh pressed him further, and asked him what he felt about the artistic life, his friend said that it was a great mystery, because art also seemed to him a strong, entrancing, fascinating thing; but that it ran counter to and cut across his relations with others, and seemed almost like a violent and distracting temptation, that tore him away from the more vital impulse. He added that the problem as to whether individuality endured (of which they had spoken earlier) seemed to him not to affect the question at all, any more than it affected one's sleep or appetite. At this, for a moment, a mist seemed to roll away from Hugh's eyes, though he knew that it would close in again, and for an instant he understood; to himself relations with others were but one class of beautiful experiences, like art, and music, and nature, and hints of the unseen; not differing in quality, but only in kind, from other experiences. Hugh saw too, in the same flash of insight, that what kept him from emotional relationships was a certain timidity--a dislike of anything painful or disturbing; and that the mistake he made, if that can be called a mistake which was so purely instinctive, was his desire to obliterate and annihilate all the unpleasing, painful, and disagreeable elements from all circumstances and situations. The reason why Hugh did not hunger and thirst after friendship was, he saw, that inconveniences, humours, misunderstandings, mannerisms, _entourage_, were all so many disagreeable incidents which interfered with his tranquillity of enjoyment. If he had really loved, these things would have weighed as nothing in comparison with the need of satisfying the desire of relationship; as it was, they weighed so much with Hugh that they overpowered the other instinct. It was really a sort of luxuriousness of temperament that intervened; and Hugh felt that for a man to say that he loved his friends, and yet to allow this fastidious sense of discomfort to prevent his seeing them, was as if a man said that he was devoted to music, and yet allowed the tumult of concert-rooms to prevent his ever going to hear music. And yet the language of friendship was so familiar, and the power of multiplying relations with others was so facile a thing with Hugh, that he saw that his failure in the matter was a deplorable and a miserable thing. He was singularly and even richly equipped for the pursuit of friendship; while his very sensitiveness, his inherent epicureanism, which made advance so easy, made progress impossible.

And yet he realised that it was useless to deplore this; that no amount of desire for the larger and deeper experience would make him capable of sustaining its pains and penalties. He saw that he was condemned to pass through life, a smiling and courteous spectator of beauty and delight; but that, through a real and vital deficiency of soul, he could have no share in the inner and holier mysteries.

XX

Limitations--Sympathy--A Quiet Choice--The Mind of God--Intuition

Hitherto it had seemed to Hugh that life was a struggle to escape from himself, from that haunting personality which, like a shadow, dogged and imitated his movements, but all with a sombre blackness, a species of business-like sadness of gesture, doing heavily and mechanically what he himself did with such blitheness and joy. Again and again that self seemed to thwart, to hinder, to check him. There were days, it seemed to him, when a conflict was waged, an unequal conflict, between that outer and that inner self. Days when the inner spirit was intense, alert, eager, and when the outer self was languid, dreary, mockingly sedate and indolent. Again there were days, and these were the saddest of all, when the inner spirit seemed to Hugh to be tranquil, high-minded, and strong; when that outer self was malign, turbulent, and headstrong, and when all the resolution and vigour he possessed, appeared to be wasted, not in following the higher aims and imaginings with a patient purpose, but in curbing and reining the rough and coltish nature that seemed so sadly yoked with his own. He felt on those days like a wearied and fretful charioteer, driving through a scene of rich and moving beauty, on which he would fain feast his eyes and heart, but compelled to an incessant watchfulness, a despairing strain, in watching and guiding his refractory, his spiteful steeds. The control he had never forfeited wholly. Perhaps his sensitiveness, his solitariness, his fastidiousness, had tended to keep his sensuous nature within bounds.

But he went through strange moods, when he could almost wish that he had not been so cautious, so prudent; he felt that he had travelled through life as a spectator merely; and the element of passionate feeling, of confessed devotion, of uncalculating love, had passed him by. He used, in these moods, to wish that he had some soul-stirring experience to look back upon, some passionate affection, some overpowering emotion, which might have constrained him to open and unashamed utterance. How had he missed, he used to ask himself, the experience of a deep and whole-hearted love? There was nothing easier in the world than to establish a certain intimacy of relation. He had, he was aware, a friendly air and a certain simple charm of manner, which made it an easy thing for him to say what was in his mind. A single interview was often enough for him to make a friendship. He had an acute superficial sensibility, which made it very easy for him to divine another's tastes and emotions; and his own emotional experiences, his freedom of expression, gave him the power of interpreting and entering into the feelings of others. But his experience was always the same. He could clasp hands with another soul, he could step pleasantly and congenially through the ante-rooms and corridors of friendship; but as soon as the great door that led to the inner rooms of the house came in sight, a certain coldness, a shamefacedness held him back; the hand was dropped, the expected word unspoken.

Thus Hugh found himself with a great number of close friends, and without a single intimate one. He had never bared his heart to another, he had never seen another heart bare before his eyes. He had never let himself go. Thus he was a master, so to speak, of the emotional elements up to a certain point; but he had never made a surrender of himself, and had always with a certain coldness checked any signs of a surrender in others. A close friendship had once been abruptly ended by the bestowal of certain deep confidences by his friend, sad and touching confidences. This incident had drawn a veil between him and his friend, a veil that he could not withdraw. His evident coldness, on the day following, to the friend who had trusted him, disconcerted and repelled the other. Hugh could remember a mute and appealing look that he gave him; but though he felt that he was acting ungenerously and even basely, he could only meet it with a blank and repellent gaze, and the friendship had been broken off, never to be renewed. He had made, too, friends with women both of his own age and older; but the moment that the friendship seemed cemented, the emotion on Hugh's part cooled into a _camaraderie_ which was both misunderstood and blamed. Why go so far if you did not mean to go further? appeared to be the unuttered question which met him; to which his own temperament seemed always to reply, why shake our easy and comfortable friendship by distracting and bewildering emotions? It was, Hugh grew to discern, a real blot in his character; it was a prudence, a caution in emotional things, a terror, no doubt, in a sensitive spirit, of giving pledges, of making vows, of surrendering the will and the spirit. It did not indeed bring him unhappiness--that was the saddest part of it; but it left him involved in a kind of selfish isolation. His soul, he felt, was like a smiling island, which with its green glades and soft turf invites the wayfarer to set foot therein, with a smiling welcome from the spirit of the place. But the wood once penetrated, then at the back of the paradise ran a cliff-front of sad-coloured crags, preventing further ingress. If indeed the shrine of the island had stood guarded within a temple which, in its deep columned and shadowed recesses, had shielded a holy presence, it would have been different; but the land beyond was bare and desolate. That was, Hugh thought, the solution. The bright foreshore, the waving trees, the shelter and fountains, seemed to promise a place of delicate delights; and there were some of those who landed there, who, on seeing the pale cliff behind, believed, with a deep curiosity, that some very sacred and beautiful thing must there be enshrined. But it was the emptiness of the further land, Hugh thought, that made it imperative to guard the mystery. In that bare land indeed he himself seemed to pace, bitterly pondering; he would even kneel on the bare rocks, and hold out his hands in intense entreaty to the God who had made him, and who withdrew Himself so relentlessly within the blank sky, that a blessing might tall upon the stony wilderness. But this blessing was withheld; whether by his own fault, or through the just will of the Father, Hugh could not wholly discern. The hard fact remained that the inner fortress was blank and bare, and that no friend or lover could be invited thither.

But as Hugh's manhood melted into his middle age, the conflict between the outer and inner spirit decreased. He was still, as ever, conscious of the coldness of his inner heart; but he grew to believe that a compromise was possible, and that his work was to cheer and welcome, with all the outer resources at his command, any pilgrims who sought his aid. He became patiently and unwearyingly kind. There was no trouble he would not take for any one who appealed to him. He gave a simple affection, a quiet sympathy, with eager readiness; and learned that, if he lacked that fiery and impetuous core of emotion, which can make the whole world different to those who can light their torches at its glow, yet he could smoothe the path and comfort the steps of less ardent, less impulsive spirits. He could add something of light and warmth to the cold world. If sometimes those who were attracted by his genial bearing and sympathetic kindness were disappointed and troubled at finding how slender a stream it was, well, that was inevitable. He realised himself that his was a shallow nature, full of motion and foam, wide but not deep, and that its bright force and swift curves hid from others, though not from himself, its lack of force and energy. And so when it came to him to lay aside his public work, and to enter a life which seemed an almost disappointingly meagre field to those who had formed high hopes of him, believing that he had a rich and prodigal nature, a depth of insight and force, he made the change himself with a fervent and abundant gratitude; feeling that he was unequal to the larger claims, and would but have attempted to hide his lack of force under a certain brisk liveliness and paradoxical display; while that in the narrow channel which his life now entered, he would at least be employing all the force of which he was capable.

He was not free from misgivings; but he felt that what appeared to be a shrinking and cowardly diffidence to others, was the inevitable result of the richness of his outer nature, the exuberance of which they held to issue from a reservoir of secret force; but, though he sighed at their disappointment, he felt that he was estimating himself more truly; and that he lacked that inner fulness of spirit, that patient unselfishness, which could alone have sustained him. He remained indeed a child, with the charm, the gaiety, the simplicity of a child, but with the wilfulness, the faint-heartedness, the desultoriness of a child. And he felt that in making his choice he was indeed following the will of his Father, making the most of his single talent, instead of juggling with it to make it appear to be two or even ten.