Beside Still Waters

"Would you be surprised to hear," said Sheldon, smiling, "that I am in accordance with most of your views? Of course legislation is not the end; it is only a way of dealing with refractory minorities. The highest individual freedom is what I aim at. But the mistake you make is in thinking that the individual effects anything; he is only the link in the chain. It is all a much larger tide, which is moving resistlessly in the background. It is this movement that I watch with the deepest hope and concern. I do not profess to direct or regulate it, it is much too large a thing for that; I merely desire to remove as far as I can the obstacles that hinder the incoming flood."

"Well," said Hugh, smiling, "as long as you do not threaten my individual freedom, I do not very much care."

"Ah," said Sheldon, "now you are talking like the worst kind of aristocrat, the early-Victorian Whig, the man who has a strong belief in popular liberty, combined with an equally strong sense of personal superiority."

"No, indeed!" said Hugh, "I bow most sincerely before the rights of society. I only claim that as long as I do not interfere with other people, they will not interfere with me. I recognise to the full the duty of men to work, but when I have complied with that, I want to approach the world in my own way. I am aware that reason tells me I am one of a vast class, and that I have certain limitations, but at the same time instinct tells me that I am sternly and severely isolated. No one and nothing can intrude into my mind and self; and I feel inclined to answer you like Dionysus in the Frogs of Aristophanes, who says to Hercules when he is being hectored, "Don't come pitching your tent in my mind, you have a house of your own!" —Secretum meum mihi, as St. Francis of Assisi said – identity is the one thing of which I am absolutely sure. One must go on perceiving, drawing in impressions, feeling, doubting, suffering; one knows that souls like one's own are moving in the mist; and if one can discern any ray of light, any break in the clouds, one must shout one's loudest to one's comrades; but you seem to me to want to silence my lonely experiences by the vote of the majority, and the vote of the majority seems to me essentially a dull and tiresome thing. Of course this sounds to you the direst egotism; but when one has labelled a thing egotistic, one has not necessarily condemned it, because the essence of the world is its egotism. You would no doubt say that we are no more alone than the leaves of a tree, that the sap which is in one leaf at one moment is the next moment in another, and that we are more linked than we know. I would give much to have that sense, but it is denied me, and meanwhile the pressure of that corporate force of which you speak seems to me merely to menace my own liberty, which is to me both sacred and dear."

Sheldon smiled. "Yes," he said, "we do indeed speak different languages. To me this sense of isolation of which you speak is merely a melancholy phantom. I rejoice to feel one of a great company, and I exult when the sap of the great tree flows up into my own small veins; but do not think that I disapprove of your position. I only feel that you are doing unconsciously the very thing that I desire you to do. But at the same time I think that you are missing a great source of strength, seeing a thing from the outside instead of feeling it from the inside. Yet I think that is the way in which artists help the world, through the passionate realisation of themselves. But you must not think that you are carrying away your share of the spoil to your lonely tent. It belongs to all of us, even what you have yourself won."

Hugh felt that Sheldon was probably speaking the truth. He thought long and earnestly over his words. But the practical outcome of his reflections was that he realised the uselessness of trying to embrace an idea which one did not instinctively feel. He knew that his real life did not lie, at all events for the present, in movements and organisations. They were meaningless words to him. His only conception of relationships was the personal conception. He desired with all his heart the uplifting, the amelioration of human beings; he could contribute best, he thought, to that, by speaking out whatever he perceived and felt, to such a circle as was in sympathy with him. Sheldon, no doubt, was doing exactly the same thing; there were abundance of people in the world, who would agree neither with Sheldon nor himself, amiable materialists, whose only instinct was to compass their own prosperity and comfort, and who cared neither for humanity nor for beauty, except in so far as they ministered to their own convenience. Hugh did not sympathise with such people, and indeed he found it hard to conceive, if what philosophers and priests predicated of the purpose of God was true, how such people came into being. The mistake, the generous mistake, that Sheldon made, was to think that humanity was righting itself. It was perhaps being righted, but ah, how slowly! The error was to believe that one's theories were the right ones. It was all far larger, vaster, more mysterious than that. Hugh knew that the element in nature and the world to which he himself responded most eagerly was the element of beauty. The existence of beauty, the appeal it made to the human spirit, seemed to him the most hopeful thing in the world. But he could not be sure that the salvation of the world lay there. Meantime, while he felt the appeal, it was his duty to tell it out among the heathen, just as it was Sheldon's duty to preach the corporateness of humanity; but Hugh believed that the truth lay with neither, but that both these instincts were but as hues of a prism, that went to the making up of the pure white light. They were rather disintegrations of some central truth, component elements of it rather than the truth itself. They were not in the least inconsistent with each other, though they differed exceedingly; and so he determined to follow his own path as faithfully as he could, and not, in response to strident cries of justice and truth, and still less in deference to taunts of selfishness and epithets of shame, to lend a timorous hand to a work in the value of which he indeed sincerely believed, but which he did not believe to be his own work. The tide was indeed rolling in, and the breakers plunging on the beach; but so far as helping it on went, it seemed to him to matter little whether you sat and watched it with awe and amazement, with rapture and even with terror, or whether you ran to and fro, as Sheldon seemed to him to be doing, busying himself in digging little channels in the sand, that the roaring sea, with the wind at its back, might foam a little higher thus upon the shore.

XXIX

Bees – A Patient Learner

The morning sun fell brightly on Hugh's breakfast-table; and a honeycomb that stood there, its little cells stored with translucent sweetness, fragrant with the pure breath of many flowers, sparkled with a golden light. Hugh fell to wondering over it. One's food, as a rule, transformed and dignified by art, and enclosed in vessels of metal and porcelain, had little that was simple or ancient about its associations; how the world indeed was ransacked for one's pleasure! meats, herbs, spices, minerals – it was strange to think what a complexity of materials was gathered for one's delight; but honey seemed to take one back into an old and savage world. Samson had gathered it from the lion's bones, Jonathan had thrust his staff into the comb, and put the bright oozings to his lips; humanity in its most ancient and barbarous form had taken delight in this patiently manufactured confection. But a further thought came to him; the philosopher spoke of a development in nature, a slow moving upward through painfully gathered experience. It was an attractive thought, no doubt, and gave a clue to the bewildering differences of the world. But after all how incredibly slow a progress it was! The whole course of history was minute enough, no doubt, in comparison with what had been; but so far as the records of mankind existed, it was not possible to trace that any great development had taken place. The lines of species that one saw to-day were just as distinct as they had been when the records of man began. They seemed to run, like separate threads out of the tapestry, complete and entire from end to end, not mixing or intermingling. Fish, birds, quadrupeds – some had died out indeed, but no creature mentioned in the earliest records showed the smallest sign of approximating or drawing near to any other creature; no bird had lost its wings or gained its hands; no quadruped had deserted instinct for reason. Bees were a case in point. They were insects of a marvellous wisdom. They had a community, a government, almost laws. They knew their own business, and followed it with intense enthusiasm. Yet in all the centuries during which they had been robbed and despoiled for the pleasure of man, they had learnt no prudence or caution. They had not even learned to rebel. Generation after generation, in fragrant cottage gardens, they made their delicious store, laying it up for their offspring. Year after year that store had been rifled; yet for all their curious wisdom, their subtle calculations, no suspicion ever seemed to have entered their heads of what was going forward. They did not even try to find a secret place in the woods for their nest; they built obediently in the straw-thatched hives, and the same spoliation continued. A few days before Hugh had visited a church in the neighbourhood, and had become aware of a loud humming in the chancel. He found that an immense swarm of bees had been hatched out in the roof, and were dying in hundreds, in their attempt to escape through the closed windows. There were plenty of apertures in the church through which they could have escaped, if they had had any idea of exploration. But they were content to buzz feebly up and down the panes, till strength failed them, and they dropped down on to the sill among the bodies of their brothers. An old man who was digging in the churchyard told Hugh that the same thing had gone on in the church every summer for as long as he could remember.

And yet one did not hesitate to accept the Darwinian theory, on the word of scientific men, though the whole of visible and recorded experience seemed to contradict it. Even stranger than the amazing complexity of the whole scheme, was the incredible patience with which the matter was matured. What was more wonderful yet, man, by his power of observing the tendencies of nature, could make her laws to a certain extent serve his own ends. He could, for instance, by breeding carefully from short-legged sheep, in itself a fortuitous and unaccountable variation from the normal type, produce a species that should be unable to leap fences which their long-legged ancestors could surmount; he could thus save himself the trouble of erecting higher fences. This power in man, this faculty for rapid self-improvement, differentiated him from all the beasts of the field; how had that faculty arisen? it seemed a gap that no amount of development could bridge. If nature had all been perfect, if its rules had been absolutely invariable, if existence were conditioned by regular laws, it would be easy enough to believe in God. And yet as it was, it seemed so imperfect, and in some ways so unsatisfactory; so fortuitous in certain respects, so wanting in prevision, so amazingly deliberate. Such an infinity of care seemed lavished on the delicate structure of the smallest insects and plants, such a prodigal fancy; and yet the laws that governed them seemed so strangely incomplete, like a patient, artistic, whimsical force, working on in spite of insuperable difficulties. It looked sometimes like a conflict of minds, instead of one mind.

And then, too, the wonder which one felt seemed to lead nowhere. It did not even lead one to ascertain sure principles of conduct and life. The utmost prudence, the most careful attempt to follow the guidance of those natural laws, was liable to be rendered fruitless by what was called an accident. One's instinct to retain life, to grasp at happiness, was so strong; and yet, again and again, one was taught that it was all on sufferance, and that one must count on nothing. One was set, it seemed, in a vast labyrinth; one must go forward, whether one would or no, among trackless paths, overhung by innumerable perils. The only thing that seemed sure to Hugh was that the more one allowed the awe, the bewilderment, to penetrate one's heart and mind, the more that one indulged a fearful curiosity as to the end and purpose of it all, the nearer one came, if not to learning the lesson, yet at least towards reaching a state of preparedness that might fit one to receive the further confidence of God. Such tranquillity as one gained by putting aside the problems which encompassed one, must be a hollow and vain tranquillity. One might indeed never learn the secret; it might be the will of God simply to confront one with the desperate problem; but a deep instinct in Hugh's heart told him that this could not be so; and he determined that he, at all events, would go about the world as a patient learner, grasping at any hint that was offered him, whether it came by the waving of grasses on the waste, by the droop of flower-laden boughs over a wall, from the strange horned insect that crawled in the dust of the highway, or from the soft gaze of loving eyes, flashing a message into the depths of his soul.

The pure faint lines of the wold that he saw from his window on the far horizon, rising so peacefully above the level pasture-land, with the hedgerow elms – what did they stand for? The mind reeled at the thought. They were nothing but a gigantic cemetery. Every inch of that soft chalk had been made up by the life and death, through millions of years, of tiny insects, swimming, dying, mouldering in the depths of some shapeless sea. Surely such a thought had a message for his soul, not less real than the simpler and more direct message of peace that the soft pale outlines, the gentle foldings of the hills, seemed to lend his troubled spirit; in such a moment his faith rose strong; he trod a shining track through the deeps of God.

XXX

Flowers – The Garden

The air that day was full of sunlight like fine gold, and put Hugh in mind of the city that was pure gold like unto clear glass!– he had often puzzled over that as a child; gold always seemed so opaque a thing, a surface without depth; but, after all, it was true of the air about him to-day – clear and transparent indeed, with a perfect clarity and purity, and yet undoubtedly all tinged with lucent liquid gold. He sate long on a bench in the college garden, a little paradise for the eye and mind; it had been skilfully laid out, and Hugh used to think that he had never seen a place so enlarged by art, where so much ground went to the acre! All the outer edge of it was encircled by trees – elms, planes, and limes; the borders, full of flowering shrubs, were laid out in graceful curves, and in the centre was a great oval bed of low-growing bushes, with the velvet turf all about it, sweeping in sunlit vistas to left and right. It gave somehow a sense of space and extent, achieved Hugh could not guess how. To-day all the edges of the borders were full of flowers; and as he wandered among them he was more than ever struck with a thought that had often come to him, the mystery of flowers! The extraordinary variety of leaf and colour, the whimsical shapes, the astonishing invention displayed, and yet an invention of an almost childish kind. There was a clump of pink blooms, such as a child might have amused itself with cutting out of paper; here rose tall spires, with sharp-cut, serrated leaves at the base; but the blue flowers on the stem were curiously lipped and horned, more like strange insects than flowers. And then the stainless freshness and delicacy of the texture, that a touch would soil! These gracious things, uncurling themselves hour by hour, blooming, fading, in obedience to the strange instinct of life, surprised him by a sudden thrill. Here was a bed of irises, with smooth blade-like stalks, snaky roots, the flowers of incredible shapes, yet no two exactly alike, all splashed and dappled with the richest colours; and then the mixture of blended fragrance; the hot, honied smell of the candytuft, with aromatic spicy scents of flowers that he could not name. Here again was the escholtzia, with its pointed horns, its bluish leaf, and the delicate orange petals, yet with a scent, pure but acid, which almost made one shudder. There was some mind behind it all, Hugh felt, but what a mind! how leisurely, how fanciful, how unfathomable! For whose pleasure were all these bright eccentric forms created? Certainly not for the pleasure of man, for Hugh thought of the acres and acres of wheat now rising in serried ranks in the deep country, with the poppies or the marigolds among them, all quietly unfolding their bells of scarlet flame, their round, sunlike faces, where no eye could see them, except the birds that flew over. Could it be for God's own pleasure that these flower shapes were made? they could not even see each other, but rose in all their freshness, as by a subtle conspiracy, yet blind to the world about them, conscious only of the sunlight and the rain, with no imaginative knowledge, it would seem, or sympathy with their brethren. It always filled Hugh with a sort of pity to think of the sightless life of trees and flowers, each rising in its place, in plain, on hill, and yet each enclosed within itself, with no consciousness of its own beauty, and still less conscious of the beauty of its fellows. And what was the life that animated them? Where did it come from? Where did it pass to? Had they any sense of joy, of sorrow? It was hard to believe that they had not. It always distressed Hugh to see flowers gathered or boughs broken; it seemed a hateful tyranny to treat these delicate creatures so for an hour's pleasure. The sight of flowers picked and then thrown carelessly down by the roadside, gave him a sense of helpless indignation. The idyllic picture of children wandering in spring, filling their hands with flower-heads torn from bank and copse, appeared to Hugh as only painful. Man, from first to last, seemed to spread a ruthless destruction around him. Hugh's windows overlooked a stream-bend much frequented by fishermen; and it was a misery to him to see the poor dace, that had lived so cool and merry a life in the dark pools of the stream, poising and darting among the river-weed, hauled up struggling to the air, to be greeted with a shout of triumph, and passed about, dying and tortured, among the hot hands, in the thin, choking air. Was that what God made them for? What compensation awaited them for so horrible and shameful an end?

Hugh felt with a sigh that the mystery was almost unendurable, that God should make, hour by hour, these curious and exquisite things, such as flowers and fishes, and thrust them, not into a world where they could live out a peaceful and innocent life, but into the midst of dangers and miseries. Sometimes, beneath his windows, he could see a shoal of little fish flick from the water in all directions at the rush of a pike, one of them no doubt horribly engulphed in the monster's jaws.

Why was so hard a price to be paid for the delightful privilege of life? Was it indifference or carelessness, as a child might make a toy, and weary of it? It seemed like it, though Hugh could not bear to think that it was so; and yet for thousands of centuries the same thing had been going on all over the world, and no one seemed an inch nearer to the mystery of it all. How such thoughts seemed to shrivel into nothing the voluble religious systems that professed to explain it all! The misery of it was that, here and everywhere, God seemed to be explaining it Himself every day and hour, and yet one missed the connection which could make it all intelligible – the connection, that is, between God, as man in his heart conceived of Him, and God as He wrote Himself large in every field and wood. On what hypothesis of pure benevolence and perfect justice could all these restless lives, so full of pain and suffering, and all alike ending in death and disappearance, be explained?

Yet, stranger still, the mystery did not make him exactly unhappy. The fresh breeze blew through the trees, the flowers blazed and shone in the steady sun, the intricate lawns lay shimmering among the shrubberies, and Hugh seemed full of a baffling and baffled joy. At that moment, at all events, God wished him well, and spread for him the exquisite pageant of life and colour and scent; the very sunshine stole like some liquid essence along his veins, and filled him with unreasoning happiness. And yet he too was encompassed by a thousand dangers; there were a hundred avenues of sense, of emotion, by which some dark messenger might steal upon him. Perhaps he lurked behind the trees of that sweet paradise, biding his time to come forth. But to-day it seemed a species of treachery to feel that anything but active love and perfect benevolence was behind these smiling flowers, those tall trees rippling in the breeze, that lucent sky. To-day at least it seemed God's will that he should be filled with peaceful content and gratitude. He would drink the cup of sweetness to-day without retrospect or misgiving. Would the memory of that sweetness stay his heart, and sustain his soul when the dark days came, when the garden should be bare and dishevelled, and a strange dying smell should hang about the walks; and when perhaps his own soul should be sorrowful even unto death?

XXXI

A Man of Science – Prophets – A Tranquil Faith – Trustfulness

The perception of one of the great truths of personality came upon Hugh in a summer day which he had spent, according to his growing inclination, almost alone. In the morning he had done some business, some writing, and had read a little. It was a week when Cambridge was almost wholly given up to festivity, and the little river that flowed beneath his house echoed all day long to the wash of boats, the stroke of oars, and the cheerful talk of happy people. The streets were full of gaily-dressed persons hurrying to and fro. This background of brisk life pleased Hugh exceedingly, so long as he was not compelled to take any part in it, so long as he could pursue his own reveries. Part of the joy was that he could peep at it from his secure retreat; it inspirited him vaguely, setting, as it were, a cheerful descant to the soft melody of his own thoughts. In the afternoon he went out leisurely into the country; it was pleasant to leave the humming town, so full of active life and merry gossip, and to find that in the country everything was going forward as though there were no pressure, no bustle anywhere. The solitary figures of men hoeing weeds in among the growing wheat, and moving imperceptibly across the wide green fields, pleased him. He wound away through comfortable villages, among elms and orchards, choosing the byways rather than the high-roads, and plunging deeper and deeper into country which it seemed that no one ever visited except on rustic business. There was a gentle south wind which rippled in the trees; the foliage had just begun to wear its late burnished look, and the meadows were full of high-seeded grass, gilded or silvered with buttercups and ox-eye daisies.

He stopped for a time to explore a little rustic church, that stood, in a careless mouldering dignity, in the centre of a small village. Here, with his gentle fondness for little omens, he became aware that some good thing was being prepared for him, for in the nave of the church, under the eaves, he noted no less than three swarms of bees, that had made their nest under the timbers of the roof, and were just awakening into summer activity. The drones were being cast out of the hives, and in an angle formed by the buttress of the church, Hugh found a small lead cistern of water, which was a curious sight; it was all full of struggling bees fallen from the roof above, either solitary bees who had darted into the surface, and could not extricate themselves, or drones with a working bee grappled, intent on pinching the life out of the poor bewildered creature, the day of whose reckoning had come. Hugh spent a long time in pulling the creatures out and setting them in the sun, till at last he was warned by slanting shadows that the evening was approaching, and he set off upon his homeward way.