Chapter 3

But it was a happy time at Truro for Hugh. Speaking generally, I should call him in those days a quick, inventive, active-minded child, entirely unsentimental; he was fond of trying his hand at various things, but he was impatient and volatile, would never take trouble, and as a consequence never did anything well. One would never have supposed, in those early days, that he was going to be so hard a worker, and still less such a worker as he afterwards became, who perfected his gifts by such continuous, prolonged, and constantly renewed labour. I recollect his giving a little conjuring entertainment as a boy, but he had practised none of his tricks, and the result was a fiasco, which had to be covered up by lavish and undeserved applause; a little later, too, at Addington, he gave an exhibition of marionettes, which illustrated historical scenes. The puppets were dressed by Beth, our old nurse, and my sisters, and Hugh was the showman behind the scenes. The little curtains were drawn up for a tableau which was supposed to represent an episode in the life of Thomas à Becket. Hugh's voice enunciated, "Scene, an a-arid waste!" Then came a silence, and then Hugh was heard to say to his assistant in a loud, agitated whisper, "Where is the Archbishop?" But the puppet had been mislaid, and he had to go on to the next tableau. The most remarkable thing about him was a real independence of character, with an entire disregard of other people's opinion. What he liked, what he felt, what he decided, was the important thing to him, and so long as he could get his way, I do not think that he troubled his head about what other people might think or wish; he did not want to earn good opinions, nor did he care for disapproval or approval; people in fact were to him at that time more or less favourable channels for him to follow his own designs, more or less stubborn obstacles to his attaining his wishes. He was not at all a sensitive or shrinking child. He was quite capable of holding his own, full of spirit and fearless, though quiet enough, and not in the least interfering, except when his rights were menaced.

IV

BOYHOOD

He went to school at Clevedon, in Somersetshire, in 1882, at Walton House, then presided over by Mr. Cornish. It was a well-managed place, and the teaching was good. I suppose that all boys of an independent mind dislike the first breaking-in to the ways of the world, and the exchanging of the freedom of home for the barrack-life of school, the absence of privacy, and the sense of being continually under the magnifying-glass which school gives. It was dreadful to Hugh to have to account for himself at all times, to justify his ways and tastes, his fancies and even his appearance, to boys and masters alike. Bullying is indeed practically extinct in well-managed schools; but small boys are inquisitive, observant, extremely conventional, almost like savages in their inventiveness of prohibitions and taboos, and perfectly merciless in criticism. The instinct for power is shown by small boys in the desire to make themselves felt, which is most easily accomplished by minute ridicule. Hugh made friends there, but he never really enjoyed the life of the place. The boys who get on well at school from the first are robust, normal boys, without any inconvenient originality, who enjoy games and the good-natured rough and tumble of school life. But Hugh was not a boy of that kind; he was small, not good at games, and had plenty of private fancies and ideas of his own. He was ill at ease, and he never liked the town of straggling modern houses on the low sea-front, with the hills and ports of Wales rising shadowy across the mud-stained tide.

He was quick and clever, and had been well taught; so that in 1885 he won a scholarship at Eton, and entered college there, to my great delight, in the September of that year. I had just returned to Eton as a master, and was living with Edward Lyttelton in a quaint, white-gabled house called Baldwin's Shore, which commanded a view of Windsor Castle, and overlooked the little, brick-parapeted, shallow pond known as Barnes' Pool, which, with the sluggish stream that feeds it, separates the college from the town, and is crossed by the main London road. It was a quaint little house, which had long ago been a boarding-house, and contained many low-coiled, odd-shaped rooms. Hugh was Edward Lyttelton's private pupil, so that he was often in and out of the place. But I did not see very much of him. He was a small, ingenuous-looking creature in those days, light-haired and blue-eyed; and when a little later he became a steerer of one of the boats, he looked very attractive in his Fourth of June dress, as a middy, with a dirk and white duck trousers, dangling an enormous bouquet from his neck. At Eton he did very little in the way of work, and his intellect must have been much in abeyance; because so poor was his performance, that it became a matter of surprise among his companions that he had ever won a scholarship at all.

I have said that I did not know very much about Hugh at Eton; this was the result of the fact that several of the boys of his set were my private pupils. It was absolutely necessary that a master in that position should avoid any possibility of collusion with a younger brother, whose friends were that master's pupils. If it had been supposed that I questioned Hugh about my pupils and their private lives, or if he had been thought likely to tell me tales, we should both of us have been branded. But as he had no wish to confide, and indeed little enough to consult anyone about, and as I had no wish for sidelights, we did not talk about his school life at all. The set of boys in which he lived was a curious one; they were fairly clever, but they must have been, I gathered afterwards, quite extraordinarily critical and quarrelsome. There was one boy in particular, a caustic, spiteful, and extremely mischief-making creature, who turned the set into a series of cliques and parties. Hugh used to say afterwards that he had never known anyone in his life with such an eye for other people's weaknesses, or with such a talent for putting them in the most disagreeable light. Hugh once nearly got into serious trouble; a small boy in the set was remorselessly and disgracefully bullied; it came out, and Hugh was involved--I remember that Dr. Warre spoke to me about it with much concern--but a searching investigation revealed that Hugh had really had nothing to do with it, and the victim of the bullying spoke insistently in Hugh's favour.

Hugh describes how the facts became known in the holidays, and how my father in his extreme indignation at what he supposed to be proved, so paralysed Hugh that he had no opportunity of clearing himself. But anyone who had ever known Hugh would have felt that it was the last thing he would have done. He was tenacious enough of his own rights, and argumentative enough; but he never had the faintest touch of the savagery that amuses itself at the sight of another's sufferings. "I hate cruelty more than anything in the whole world," he wrote later; "the existence of it is the only thing which reconciles my conscience to the necessity of Hell."

Hugh speaks in his book, _The Confession of a Convert_, about the extremely negative character of his religious impressions at school. I think it is wholly accurate. Living as we did in an ecclesiastical household, and with a father who took singular delight in ceremonial and liturgical devotion, I think that religion did impress itself rather too much as a matter of solemn and dignified occupation than as a matter of feeling and conduct. It was not that my father ever forgot the latter; indeed, behind his love for symbolical worship lay a passionate and almost Puritan evangelicalism. But he did not speak easily and openly of spiritual experience. I was myself profoundly attracted as a boy by the æsthetic side of religion, and loved its solemnities with all my heart; but it was not till I made friends with Bishop Wilkinson at the age of seventeen that I had any idea of spiritual religion and the practice of friendship with God. Certainly Hugh missed it, in spite of very loving and earnest talks and deeply touching letters from my father on the subject. I suppose that there must come for most people a spiritual awakening; and until that happens, all talk of emotional religion and the love of God is a thing submissively accepted, and simply not understood or realised as an actual thing.

Hugh was not at Eton very long--not more than three or four years. He never became in any way a typical Etonian. If I am asked to say what that is, I should say that it is the imbibing instinctively of what is eminently a fine, manly, and graceful convention. Its good side is a certain chivalrous code of courage, honour, efficiency, courtesy, and duty. Its fault is a sense of perfect rightness and self-sufficiency, an overvaluing of sport and games, an undervaluing of intellectual interests, enthusiasm, ideas. It is not that the sense of effortless superiority is to be emphasized or insisted upon--modesty entirely forbids that--but it is the sort of feeling described ironically in the book of Job, when the patriarch says to the elders, "No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." It is a tacit belief that all has been done for one that the world can do, and that one's standing is so assured that it need never be even claimed or paraded.

Still less was Hugh a typical Colleger. College at Eton, where the seventy boys who get scholarships are boarded, is a school within a school. The Collegers wear gowns and surplices in public, they have their own customs and traditions and games. It is a small, close, clever society, and produces a tough kind of self-confidence, together with a devotion to a particular tradition which is almost like a religious initiation. Perhaps if the typical Etonian is conscious of a certain absolute rightness in the eyes of the world, the typical Colleger has a sense almost of absolute righteousness, which does not need even to be endorsed by the world. The danger of both is that the process is completed at perhaps too early a date, and that the product is too consciously a finished one, needing to be enlarged and modified by contact with the world.

But Hugh did not stay at Eton long enough for this process to complete itself. He decided that he wished to compete for the Indian Civil Service; and as it was clear that he could not do this successfully at Eton, my father most reluctantly allowed him to leave.

I find among the little scraps which survive from his schoolboy days, the following note. It was written on his last night at Eton. He says: "_I write this on Thursday evening after ten. Peel keeping passage._" "Peel" is Sidney Peel, the Speaker's son. The passages are patrolled by the Sixth Form from ten to half-past, to see that no boy leaves his room without permission. Then follows:

_My feelings on leaving are-- Excitement. Foreboding of Wren's and fellows there. Sorrow at leaving Eton. Pride as being an old Etonian. Certain pleasure in leaving for many trivial matters. Feeling of importance. Frightful longing for India. Homesickness._ _DEAR ME!_

It was characteristic of Hugh that he should wish both to analyse his feelings on such an occasion, and to give expression to them.

V

AT WREN'S

Hugh accordingly went to Mr. Wren's coaching establishment in London, living partly at Lambeth, when my family were in town, and partly as a boarder with a clergyman. It was a time of hard work; and I really retain very few recollections of him at all at this date. I was myself very busy at Eton, and spent the holidays to a great extent in travelling and paying visits; and I think that Christmas, when we used to write, rehearse, and act a family play, was probably the only time at which I saw him.

Hugh went abroad for a short time to learn French, with a party of Indian Civil Service candidates, and no doubt forgot to write home, for I find the following characteristic letter of my father's to him:

Lambeth Palace, S.E., _30th June_ 1889.

My dearest Hughie,--We have been rather mourning about not hearing one word from you. We _supposed_ all would be right as you were a large party. But _one_ word would be so easy to those who love you so, who have done all they could to enable you to follow your own line, against their own wishes and affection!

We hope at any rate you are writing to-day. And we have sent off "Pioneers and Founders," which we hope will both give you happy and interesting Sunday reading, and remind you of us.

Mr. Spiers writes that you are backward in French but getting on rather fast.

I want you now at the beginning of this cramming year to make two or three Resolutions, besides those which you know and have thought of often and practised:

1. To determine never to do any secular examination work on Sundays--to keep all reading that day as fitting "The _Lord's_ Day" and the "Day of Rest."

I had a poor friend who would have done very well at Oxford, but he would make no difference between Sunday and other days. He worked on just the same and in the Examination _itself_, just as the goal was reached, he broke down and took no degree. The doctors said it was all owing to the continuous nervous strain. If he had taken the Sundays it would just have saved him.

Lord Selborne was once telling me of his tremendous work at one time, and he said, "I never could have done it, but that I took my Sundays. I never would work on them."

2. We have arranged for you to go over to the Holy Communion one day at Dinan. Perhaps some nice fellow will go with you--Mr. Spiers will anyhow. Tell us _which_ Sunday, so that we may all be with you [Greek: en pneumati].

Last night we dined at the Speaker's to meet, the Prince and Princess of Wales. It was very interesting. The Terrace of the House of Commons was lighted with electric light. A steamer went by and cheered!

The Shah will fill London with grand spectacles, and I suppose his coming will have much effect on politics--perhaps on _India_ too.

All are well.--Ever your most loving father,

Edw. Cantuar.

I am going to preach at the Abbey to-night.

Hugh failed, however, to secure a place in the Indian Civil Service, and it was decided that he should go up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and read for classical honours.

Up to this date I do not think that anything very conscious or definite had been going on in Hugh's mind or heart. He always said himself that it astonished him on looking back to think how purely negative and undeveloped his early life had been, and how it had been lived on entirely superficial lines, without plans or ambitions, simply taking things as they came.

I think it was quite true that it was so; his emotions were dormant, his powers were dormant. I do not think he had either great affections or great friendships. He liked companionship and amusement, he avoided what bored him; he had no inclinations to evil, but neither had he any marked inclinations to what was good. Neither had any of his many and varied gifts and accomplishments showed themselves. I used to think latterly that he was one of the most gifted people I had ever seen in all artistic ways. Whatever he took up he seemed able to do, without any apprenticeship or drudgery. Music, painting, drawing, carving, designing--he took them all up in turn; and I used to feel that if he had devoted himself to any one of them he could have reached a high excellence. Even his literary gifts, so various and admirable, showed but few signs of their presence in the early days; he was not in the least precocious. I think that on the whole it was beneficial to him that his energies all lay fallow. My father, stern as his conception of duty was, had a horror of applying any intellectual pressure to us. I myself must confess that I was distinctly idle and dilettante both as a boy at Eton and as a Cambridge undergraduate. But much as my father appreciated and applauded any little successes, I was often surprised that I was never taken to task for my poor performances in work and scholarship. The truth was that my eldest brother's death at Winchester was supposed partly to have been due to his extraordinary intellectual and mental development, and I am sure that my father was afraid of over-stimulating our mental energies. I feel certain that what was going on in Hugh's case all the time was a keen exercise of observation. I have no doubt that his brain was receiving and gaining impressions of every kind, and that his mind was not really inactive--it was only unconsciously amassing material. He had a very quick and delighted perception of human temperament, of the looks, gestures, words, mannerisms, habits, and oddities of human beings. If Hugh had been born in a household professionally artistic, and had been trained in art of any kind, I think he would very likely have become an accomplished artist or musician, and probably have shown great precocity. But he was never an artist in the sense that art was a torment to him, or that he made any sacrifice of other aims to it. It was always just a part of existence to him, and of the nature of an amusement, though in so far as it represented the need of self-expression in forms of beauty, it underlay and permeated the whole of his life.

The first sign of his artistic enthusiasm awakening was during his time in London, when he conceived an intense admiration for the music and ceremony of St. Paul's. Sir George Martin, on whom my father had conferred a musical degree, was very kind to him, and allowed Hugh to frequent the organ-loft. "To me," Hugh once wrote, "music is the great reservoir of emotion from which flow out streams of salvation." But this was not only a musical devotion. I believe that he now conceived, or rather perhaps developed, a sense of the symbolical poetry of religious rites and ceremonies which remained with him to the end. It is true to say that the force and quality of ritual, as a province of art, has been greatly neglected and overlooked. It is not for a moment to be regarded as a purely artistic thing; but it most undoubtedly has an attraction and a fascination as clear and as sharply defined as the attraction of music, poetry, painting or drama. All art is an attempt to express a sense of the overwhelming power of beauty. It is hard to say what beauty is, but it seems to be one of the inherent qualities of the Unknown, an essential part of the Divine mind. In England we are so stupid and so concrete that we are apt to think of a musician as one who arranges chords, and of a painter as one who copies natural effects. It is not really that at all. The artist is in reality struggling with an idea, which idea is a consciousness of an amazing and adorable quality in things, which affects him passionately and to which he must give expression. The form which his expression takes is conditioned by the sharpness of his perception in some direction or other. To the musician, notes and intervals and vibrations are just the fairy flights and dances of forms audible to the ear; to the painter, it is a question of shapes and colours perceptible to the eye. The dramatist sees the same beauty in the interplay of human emotion; while it may be maintained that holiness itself is a passionate perception of moral beauty, and that the saint is attracted by purity and compassion, and repelled by sin, disorder, and selfishness, in the same way as the artist is attracted and repelled by visible charm and ugliness.

Ritual has been as a rule so closely annexed to religion--though all spectacular delights and ceremonies have the same quality--that it has never been reckoned among artistic predilections. The aim of ritual is, I believe, a high poetry of which the essence is symbolism and mystery. The movement of forms solemnly vested, and with a background of architecture and music, produces an emotion quite distinct from other artistic emotions. It is a method, like all other arts, through which a human being arrives at a sense of mysterious beauty, and it evokes in mystical minds a passion to express themselves in just that way and no other, and to celebrate thus their sense of the unknown.

But there has always been a natural terror in the religious mind of laying too much stress on this, or of seeming to encourage too much an æsthetic emotion. If the first business of religion is to purify life, there will always be a suspicion of idolatry about ritual, a fear of substituting a vague desire for beauty for a practical devotion to right conduct.

Hugh wrote to me some years later what he felt about it all:

"... Liturgy, to my mind, is nothing more than a very fine and splendid art, conveying things, to people who possess the liturgical faculty, in an extraordinarily dramatic and vivid way. I further believe that this is an art which has been gradually brought nearer and nearer perfection by being tested and developed through nineteen centuries, by every kind of mind and nationality. The way in which it does, indisputably, appeal to such very different kinds of people, and unite them, does, quite apart from other things, give it a place with music and painting.

* * * * *

"I do frankly acknowledge Liturgy to be no more than an art--and therefore not in the least generally necessary to salvation; and I do not in the least 'condemn' people who do not appreciate it. It is only a way of presenting facts--and, in the case of Holy Week Ceremonies, these facts are such as those of the Passion of Christ, the sins of men, the Resurrection and the Sovereignty of Christ."

* * * * *