Beside Still Waters by Arthur Christopher Benson (sites to read books for free TXT) 📖

years were given in a vein of high enthusiasm. This worthy clergyman had seemed, if his memory was to be trusted, to have been the shining centre of a group whose life threw the life of young Athens, as represented by Plato, into the shade. The man in question seemed, in later years, a sturdily built clergyman, slow and cautious of speech, brusque and even grim of address, sensible, devoted to commonplace activities, and with a due appreciation of the comforts and conveniences of life. His conversation had no suggestiveness or subtlety. He was grumpy in the morning and good-humoured in the evening. He seemed impatient of new ideas, and endowed with a firm grasp of conventional and obvious notions.

Hugh's own recollection of his university days was very different, and yet he had lived in what might be called an intellectual set. There had been plenty of easy friendship, abundance of lively gossip, incessant and rather tedious festivities. Men had groaned and grumbled over their work, played games with hearty conviction, had nourished no great illusions about themselves and each other, had had few generous and ardent visions about art, poetry, or humanity; or, if they had, they had kept them to themselves with a very good show of contented indifference. There was indeed a little society to which Hugh had belonged, where books, and not very recondite ideas, of ethical or moral import, were discussed freely and amiably, without affectation, and occasionally with a certain amount of animation. But the arguments engendered were flimsy, inconsequent, and fantastic enough; the dialectic flashed to and fro, never very convincing, and mostly intended to aggravate rather than to persuade. Even at the time it had often appeared to Hugh to be shallow and flimsy. He had seldom heard a subject debated with any thoroughness or justice, and he had learnt far more from the preparation of occasional papers framed to initiate a discussion, than from any discussion that followed. The best thoughts that Hugh had apprehended in those days had been the thoughts that he had won from books; his mind had opened rapidly then, in the direction of a kind of poetical metaphysic, not deep speculation on the ultimate nature of things, so much as reflection on the more psychological problems of character and personality. It seemed to Hugh that his own mind, and the minds of those with whom he had lived, had been a mass of prejudices, of half-formed and inconsistent theories. None of them had had any policy into which they fitted the ideas that came to them; but a new and attractive idea had been seized upon, on its own merits, without any reference to other theories, or with any desire to co-ordinate it with other ideas, which were indeed just thrust aside to make room for the new one.

Hugh's idea of mental progress, in his later years, was the slow dwelling upon some thought, the quiet application of it to other thoughts. It seemed an inversion of the ordinary method of progress, if the biographies that he read were true. Taking the case, for instance, of the particular man whom Hugh had known, and whose biography he had studied, he seemed in youth to have been generous, fearless, candid, and ardent, and life must have been to him a process of hardening and encrusting with prejudice; he seemed to have begun with a bright faith in ideas, and to have ended with a dull belief in organisations. He had begun by being thrilled with the beauty of virtue, and he had ended by supporting the G.F.S. Hugh's experience was the exact opposite of this. He had begun, he thought, by being loaded and burdened with prejudices and stupid notions, acquired he knew not how; he had not doubted the value of authority, tradition, usage; as life went on, it seemed to him that he had got rid of his prejudices one by one, and that he had arrived, at the age of forty, at valuing sincerity, sympathy, simplicity, and candour, above dogma and accumulated beliefs. He had begun with a firm faith in systems and institutions; he had ended by basing all his hopes on the individual. He had begun by looking for beauty and perfection wherever he was told to expect it; if he had not discerned it, he had blamed his own dulness of perception. It had been a heavy and soulless business; and the real freshness of life, intellectual curiosity, mental independence, seemed to have come to him in fullest measure, just at the age when most men seemed to have parted with those qualities. As an undergraduate, he had been more aware of fitfulness and weariness than anything; only gradually had he become conscious of concentration, sustained zest, intention. Then he had tended to condemn enthusiasm as a species of defective manners. Now he lived by its steady light. Then he had been at the mercy of a new idea, an attractive personality. He shuddered to think how easily he had made friendships, and how contemptuously he had broken them the moment he was disappointed. Now he weighed and tested more; but at the same time he also opened his heart and his thoughts far more deliberately and frankly to sympathetic and generous people.

Hugh seemed to have found rather than to have lost his youth. His actual youth, indeed, seemed to him to have been a tremulous and listless thing, full of fears and sensibilities, feminine, unbalanced, frivolous. Life had so far been to Hugh pure gain. Looking back he saw himself irresolute, vague, sentimental, incapable of application, unmethodical, half-hearted. He had had none of the buoyancy, the splendid dreams, the sparkling ambitions that seemed, according to the records, to have been the stuff of great men's youth.

He sate one day in the ante-chapel of his old college, through a morning service, listening, as in a dream, to the sweet singing within; it seemed but a day since he had sate in his stall, a fitful-hearted boy. The service ended, and the procession streamed out, the rich tints of the windows lighting up the faces and the white surplices of the men, old and young, that issued from the dark door of the screen. Hugh felt within himself that he would not have the old days back again even if he could; he was nothing but grateful for the balance, the serenity, that life had brought him. He was conscious of greater strength, undimmed energy, increased zest; faltering indeed he was still, not better, not more unselfish; but he had a sense of truer values, more proportion, more contentment. The mysteries of life were as dark as ever, but at least he no longer thought that he had the key; in those days his little rickety system of life, that trembled in every breeze, had seemed for him to bridge all gaps, to explain all mysteries. Now indeed chaos stretched all about him, full of huge mists, dark chasms, hidden echoes; but he perceived something of its vastness and immensity; he had broken down the poor frail fences of his soul, and was in contact with reality. He did not doubt that he seemed to the younger generation an elderly and sombre personage, stumbling down the dark descent of life, with youth and brightness behind him; but that descent appeared to himself to be rather an upward-rising road, over dim mountains, the air glowing about him with some far-off sunrise. Poetry, art, religion--they meant a thousandfold more to him than they had meant in the old days. They had been pretty melodies, deft tricks of hand, choice toys then. Now they were exultations, agonies, surrenders, triumphs. The prospect of life had been to him in those days like misty ranges, full of threatening precipices, and dumb valleys in which no foot had trod. Now he saw from the hill-brow, a broad and goodly land full of wood and pasture, clustered hamlets, glittering, smoke-wrapt towns, rivers widening to the sea; the horizons closed by the blue hills of hope, from which life and love, and even death itself, seemed to wave hands of welcome ere they dipped to the unseen. He blessed God for that; and best of all he had now no desire, as he had had in the old days, to be understood, to be felt, to claim a place, to exercise an influence. He had put all that aside; his only concern was now to step as swiftly, as strongly as possible, upon the path that opened before him, caring little whether it led on to grassy moorlands, or sheltered valleys full of wood, or even to the towered walls of some strong city of God.


XI

Platonism--The Pure Gospel--The Pauline Gospel--The Harmony

Hugh, in his leisure, determined to try if he could set his mind at rest upon one point, a question that had always exercised a certain attraction over him. This was to make himself acquainted with some technical philosophy, or at any rate to try and see what the philosophers were doing. He had not, he was aware, a mind suited for the pursuit of metaphysics; he had little logical faculty and little power of deduction; he tended to view a question at bright and radiant points; he could not systematise or arrange it. He did not expect to be able to penetrate the mystery, or to advance step by step nearer to the dim and ultimate causes of things; but he thought he would like to look into the philosophers' workshop, as a man might visit a factory. He expected to see a great many processes going on the nature of which he did not hope to discern, and the object of which would be made still more obscure by the desperately intelligent explanations of some obliging workman, who would glibly use technical words to which he would himself be able to attach no sort of meaning.

But after a few excursions into modern philosophy, in which he seemed, as Tennyson said, to be wading as in a sea of glue, he went back to the earliest philosophers and read Aristotle and Plato. He soon conceived a great horror of Aristotle, of his subtle and ingenious analysis, which often seemed to him to be an attempt to define the undefinable, and never to touch the point of the matter at all; he thought that Aristotle was often occupied in the scientific treatment of essentially poetical ideas, and in the attempt to classify rather than to explain. Yet there were moments, it seemed to him, when Aristotle, writing with a kind of grim contempt for the vagueness of Plato, was carried off his feet by the Platonic enthusiasm; and so Hugh turned to Plato, which he had scrambled through as an undergraduate long years before. How incomparably beautiful it was! It revealed to Hugh what he had before only dimly suspected, that the poet, the moralist, the priest, the philosopher, and even the man of science, were all in reality engaged in the same task--penetrating the vast and bewildering riddle of the world. In Plato he found the philosophical method suffused by a burning poetical imagination; and he thought that Plato solved far more metaphysical riddles by a species of swift intuition than ever could be done by the closest analysis. He realised that Plato's theory was of a great, central, motionless entity, which acted not by expulsive energy but by a sort of magnetic attraction; and that all the dreams, the hopes, the activities of human minds were not