Part 10 (1/2)

Sometimes, for weeks together at Cambridge, Hugh would go without hearing any music at all, until an almost physical thirst would fall upon him. In such an arid mood, he would find himself tyrannously affected by any chance fragment of music wafted past him; he would go to some cheerful party, where, after the meal was over, a piano would be opened, and a simple song sung or a short piece played. This would come like a draught of water to a weary traveller, bearing Hugh away out of his surroundings, away from gossip and lively talk, into a remote and sheltered place; it was like opening a cas.e.m.e.nt from a familiar and lighted room, and leaning out over a dim land, where the sunset was slowly dying across the rim of the tired world.

Hugh always found it easy to make friends with musicians. They generally seemed to him to be almost a race apart; their art seemed to withdraw them in a curious way from the world, and to absorb into itself the intellectual vigour which was as a rule, with ordinary men, distributed over a variety of interests. He knew some musicians who were men of wide cultivation, but they were very much the exception; as a rule, they seemed to Hugh to be a simple and almost childlike species, fond of laughter and elementary jests, with emotions rather superficial than deep, and not regarding life from the ordinary standpoint at all. The reason lay, Hugh believed, in the nature of the medium in which they worked; the writer and the artist were brought into direct contact with humanity; it was their business to interpret life, to investigate emotion; but the musician was engaged with an art that was almost mathematical in its purity and isolation; he worked under the strictest law, and though it required a severe and strong intellectual grip, it was not a process which had any connection with emotions or with life. But Hugh always felt himself to be inside the charmed circle, and though he knew but little of the art, musical talk always had a deep interest for him, and he seemed to divine and understand more than he could explain or express.

But still it was true that music had played no part in his intellectual development; he had never approached it on that side; it had merely ministered to him at intervals a species of emotional stimulus; it had seemed to him to speak a language, dim and unintelligible, but the purport of which he interpreted to be somehow high and solemn. There seemed indeed to be nothing in the world that spoke in such mysterious terms of an august destiny awaiting the soul. The origin, the very elements of the joy of music were so absolutely inexplicable. There seemed to be no a.s.signable cause for the fact that the mixture of rhythmical progress and natural vibration should have such a singular and magical power over the human soul, and affect it with such indescribable emotion.

He had sometimes seen, half with amus.e.m.e.nt, half with a far deeper interest, the physical effect which the music of some itinerant piano-organ would produce upon street children; they seemed affected by some curious intoxication; their gestures, their smiles, their self-conscious glances, their dancing movements, so unnatural in a sense, and yet so instinctive, made the process appear almost magical in its effects. Though it did not affect him so personally, it seemed to have a similarly intoxicating effect on Hugh's own mind. Even if the particular piece that he was listening to had no appeal to his spirit, even if it were only a series of lively cascades of tripping notes, his thoughts, he found, took on an excited, an irrepressible tinge. But if on the other hand the time and the mood were favourable, if the piece were solemn or mournful, or of a melting sweetness, it seemed for a moment to bring a sense of true values into life, to make him feel, by a silent inspiration, the rightness and the perfection of the scheme of the world.

One evening a friend of Hugh's, who was organist of one of the important college chapels, took him and a couple of friends into the building. It had been a breathlessly hot summer day, but the air inside had a coolness and a peace which revived the languid frame. It was nearly dark, but the great windows smouldered with deep fiery stains, and showed here and there a pale face, or the outline of a mysterious form, or an intricacy of twined tabernacle-work. Only a taper or two were lit in the shadowy choir; and a light in the organ-loft sent strange shadows, a waving hand or a gigantic arm, across the roof, while the quiet movements of the player were heard from time to time, the pa.s.sage of his feet across the gallery, or the rustling of the leaves of a book. Hugh and his friends seated themselves in the stalls; and then for an hour the great organ uttered its voice--now a soft and delicate strain, a lonely flute or a languid reed outlining itself upon the movement of the accompaniment; or at intervals the symphony worked up to a triumphant outburst, the trumpets cras.h.i.+ng upon the air, and a sudden thunder outrolling; the great pedals seeming to move, like men walking in darkness, treading warily and firmly; until the whole ended with a soft slow movement of perfect simplicity and tender sweetness, like the happy dying of a very old and honourable person, who has drunk his fill of life and blessings, and closes his eyes for very weariness and gladness, upon labour and praise alike.

The only shadow of this beautiful hour was that in this rapt s.p.a.ce of tranquil reflection one seemed to have harmonised and explained life, joy and disaster alike, to have wound up a clue, to have brought it all to a peaceful and perfect climax of silence, like a tale that is told; and then it was necessary to go out to the world again with all its bitterness, its weariness, its dissatisfaction--till one almost wondered whether it was wise or brave to have chased and captured this strange phantom of imagined peace.

Yes, it was wise sometimes, Hugh felt sure! to have refused it would have been like refusing to drink from a cool and bubbling wayside spring, as one fared on a hot noon over the s.h.i.+mmering mountain-side--refused, in a spirit of false austerity, for fear that one would thirst again through the dreary leagues ahead. As long as one remembered that it was but an imagined peace, that one had not attained it, it was yet well to remember that the peace was real, that it existed somewhere, even though it was still shut within the heart of G.o.d. However slow the present progress, however long the road, it was possible to look forward in hope, to know that one would move more blithely and firmly when the time should come for the desired peace to be given one more abundantly; it helped one, as one stumbled and lingered, to look a little further on, and to say, ”I will run the way of Thy commandments, when Thou hast set my heart at liberty.”

x.x.xIV

Pictorial Art--Hand and Soul--Turner--Raphael--Secrets of Art

Hugh's professional life had given him little opportunity for indulging artistic tastes. He had been very fond as a boy of sketching, especially architectural subjects; it had trained his powers of observation; but there had come a time when, as a young man, he had deliberately laid his sketching aside. The idea in his mind had been that if one desired to excel in any form of artistic expression, one must devote all one's artistic faculty to that. He had been conscious of a certain diffuseness of taste, a love of music and a love of pictorial art being both strong factors in his mind; but he was also dimly conscious that he matured slowly; that he had none of the facile grasp of difficult things which characterised some of his more able companions; his progress was always slow, and he arrived at mastery through a long wrestling with inaccuracy and half knowledge; his perception was quick, but his grasp feeble, while his capacity for forgetting and losing his hold on things was great. He therefore made a deliberate choice in the matter, guided, he now felt, rather by a kind of intuition than by any very definite principle, and determined to restrict his artistic energies to a single form of art. His father, he remembered, had remonstrated with him, and had said that by giving up sketching he was sacrificing a great resource of recreation and amus.e.m.e.nt. He had no answer at the time to the criticism, but it seemed to him that he knew his own mind in the matter, and that as he could not hope, he thought, to attain to any real excellence in draughtsmans.h.i.+p, it had better be cut off altogether, and his energies, such as they were--he knew that the spring was not a copious one--confined to a more definite channel.

As life went on, and as time became more and more precious, as his literary work more and more absorbed him, he drew away from the artistic region; in his early years of manhood he had travelled a good deal, and the seeing of pictures had always been part of the programme; but his work became heavier, and the holidays had tended more and more to be spent in some quiet English retreat, where he could satisfy his delight in nature, and re-read some of the old beloved books. A certain physical indolence was also a factor, an indolence which made wandering in a picture-gallery always rather a penance; but he contrived at intervals to go and look at pictures in London in a leisurely way, both old and new; and he had one or two friends who possessed fine works of art, which could be enjoyed calmly and quietly.

He was aware that he was losing some catholicity of mind by this--but he knew his limitations, and more and more became aware that his const.i.tutional energy was not very great, and needed to be husbanded.

He was quite aware that he was not what would be called a cultivated person, that his knowledge both of art and music was feeble and amateurish; but he saw, or thought he saw, that people of wide cultivation often sacrificed in intensity what they gained in width; and as he became gradually aware that the strongest faculty he possessed was the literary faculty, he saw that he could not hope to nourish it without a certain renunciation. He had no taste for becoming an expert or a connoisseur; he had not the slightest wish to instruct other people, or to arrive at a technical and professional knowledge of art. He was content to leave it to be a rare luxury, a thing which, when the opportunity and the mood harmonised, could open a door for him into a beautiful world of dreams. He was quite aware that he often liked what would be called the wrong things; but what he was on the look-out for in art was not technical perfection or finished skill, but a certain indefinable poetical suggestion, which pictures could give him, when they came before him in certain moods. The mood, indeed, mattered more than the picture; moreover it was one of the strangest things about pictorial art, that the work of certain artists seemed able to convey poetical suggestion, even when the poetical quality seemed to be absent from their own souls. He knew a certain great artist well, who seemed to Hugh to be an essentially materialistic man, fond of sport and society, of money, and the pleasures that money could buy, who spoke of poetical emotion as moons.h.i.+ne, and seemed frankly bored by any attempt at the mystical apprehension of beautiful things, who could yet produce, by means of his mastery of the craft, pictures full of the tenderest and loveliest emotion and poetry. Hugh tried hard to discern this quality in the man's soul, tried to believe that it was there, and that it was deliberately disguised by a pose of bluff unaffectedness. But he came to the conclusion that it was not there, and that the painter achieved his results only by being able to represent with incredible fidelity the things in nature that held the poetical quality. On the other hand he had a friend of real poetical genius, who was also an artist, but who could only produce the stiffest and hardest works of art, that had no quality about them except the quality of tiresome definiteness.

This was a great mystery to Hugh; but it ended eventually, after a serious endeavour to appreciate what was approved by the general verdict to be of supreme artistic value, in making him resolve that he would just follow his own independent taste, and discern whatever quality of beauty he could, in such art as made an appeal to him. Thus he was not even an eclectic; he was a mere amateur; he treated art just as a possible vehicle of poetical suggestion, and allowed it to speak to him when and where it could and would.

He had moreover a great suspicion of conventionality in taste. A man of accredited taste often seemed to him little more than a man who had the faculty of admiring what it was the fas.h.i.+on to admire. Hugh had been for a short time under the influence of Ruskin, and had tried sincerely to see the magnificence of Turner, and to loathe the artificiality of Claude Lorraine. But when he arrived at his more independent att.i.tude, he found that there was much to admire in Claude; that exquisite golden atmosphere, suffusing a whole picture with an evening glow, enriching the lavish foreground, and touching into romantic beauty headland after headland, that ran out, covered with delicate woodland, into the tranquil lake; those ruinous temples with a quiet flight of birds about them; the mysterious figures of men emerging from the woods on the edges of the water, bent serenely on some simple business, had the magical charm; and then those faint mountains closing the horizon, all rounded with the golden haze of evening, seemed to hold, in their faintly indicated heights and folds, a delicate peace, a calm repose, as though glad just to be, just to wait in that reposeful hour for the quiet blessing of waning light, the sober content so richly shed abroad. It was not criticism, Hugh thought, to say that it was all impossibly combined, falsely conceived.

It was not, perhaps, a transcript of any one place or one hour; but it had an inner truth for all that; it had the spirit of evening with its pleasant weariness, its gentle recollection, its waiting for repose; or it had again the freshness of the morning, the vital hope that makes it delightful to rise, to cast off sleep, to go abroad, making light of the toil and heat that the day is to bring.

And then, in studying Turner, he learnt to see that, lying intermingled with all the power and n.o.bility of much of his work, there was a displeasing extravagance, a violence, a faultiness of detail, an exaggeration that often ruined his pictures. Neither he nor Claude were true to life; but there was an insolence sometimes about Turner's variation from fact, which made him shudder. How he seemed sometimes, in his pictures of places familiar to Hugh--such, for instance, as the drawing of Malham Cove--to miss, by his heady violence, all the real, the essential charm of the place. Nature was not what Turner depicted it; and he did not even develop and heighten its beauty, but subst.i.tuted for the real charm an almost grotesque personal mannerism.

Turner's idea of nature seemed to Hugh often purely theatrical and melodramatic, wanting in restraint, in repose. The appeal of Turner seemed to him to be constantly an appeal to childish and unperceptive minds, that could not notice a thing unless it was forced upon them.

Some of the earlier pictures indeed, such as that of the frost-bound lane, with the boy blowing on his fingers, and the horses nibbling at the stiff gra.s.s, with the cold light of the winter's dawn coming slowly up beyond the leafless hedge, seemed to him to be perfectly beautiful; but the Turner of the later period, the Turner so wildly upheld by Ruskin, seemed to Hugh to have lost sight of nature, in the pleasure of constructing extravagant and fantastic schemes of colour. The true art seemed to Hugh not to be the art that trumpets beauty aloud, and that drags a spectator roughly to admire; but the art that waits quietly for the sincere nature-lover, and gives a soft hint to which the soul of the spectator can add its own emotion. To Hugh it was much a matter of mood. He would go to a gallery of ancient or modern art, and find that there many pictures had no message or voice for him; and then some inconspicuous picture would suddenly appeal to him with a mysterious force--the pathetic glance of childish eyes, or an old face worn by toil and transfigured by some inner light of hopefulness; or a woodland scene, tree-trunks rising amid a copse; or the dark water of a sea-cave, lapping, translucent and gem-like, round rock ledges; or a reedy pool, with the chimneys of an old house rising among elms hard by: in a moment the mood would come upon him, and he would feel that a door had been opened for his spirit into a place of sweet imaginings, of wistful peace, bringing to him a hope of something that might a.s.suredly be, some deep haven of G.o.d where the soul might float upon a golden tide. One day, for instance, two old line-engravings of Italian pictures which he had inherited, and which hung in his little library, gave him this sense; he had known them ever since he was a child, and they had never spoken to him before. Had they hung all these years patiently waiting for that moment? One was ”The Betrothal of the Virgin,” by Raphael, where the old bearded priest in his tiara, with his robes girt precisely about him, casts an inquiring look on the pair, as Joseph, a worn, majestic figure, puts the ring on the Virgin's finger. Some of it was hard and formal enough; the flowers on Joseph's rod might have been made of china; the slim figure of the disappointed suitor, breaking his staff, had an unpleasing trimness; and the companions of the Virgin were models of feeble serenity. But the great new octagonal temple in the background,--an empty place it seemed--for the open doors gave a glimpse of shadowy ranges--the shallow steps, the stone volutes, the low hills behind, with the towered villa--even the beggars begging of the richly dressed persons on the new-laid pavement--all these had a sudden appeal for him.

The other picture was the ”Communion of Jerome,” by Domenichino--a stiff, conventional design enough. The cherubs hanging in air might have been made of wax or even metal--there was no aerial quality about them--they c.u.mbered the place! But the wistful look of the old worn saint, kneeling so faintly, so wearily, the pure lines of the shrine, the waxlights, the stiff robes of the priest, the open arch showing an odd, cl.u.s.tered, castellated house, rising on its steep rocks among dark brushwood, with a glimmering pool below, and mysterious persons drawing near--it all had a tyrannical effect on Hugh's mind. Probably a conventional critic would have spoken approvingly of the Raphael and disdainfully enough of the Domenichino--but the point to Hugh was not in the art revealed, but in the a.s.sociation, the remoteness, the suggestiveness of the pictures. The faults of each were patent to him; but something in that moment shone through; one looked through a half-open door, and saw some beautiful mystery being celebrated within, something that one could not explain or a.n.a.lyse, but which was none the less certainly there.

Thus art became to Hugh, like nature, an echoing world that lay all about him, which could suddenly become all alive with constraining desire and joy. There was a scientific apprehension of both nature and art possible, no doubt. The very science that lay behind art had a suggestiveness of its own; that again had its own times for appeal.

But Hugh felt that here again he must realise his limitations, and that life, to be real, must be a constant resisting of diffuse wanderings in knowledge and perception. That his own medium was the medium of words, and that his task was to discern their colour and weight, their significance, whether alone or in combination; that he must be able to upraise the jointed fabric of thought, like a framework of slim rods of firm metal, not meant to be seen or even realised by the reader, but which, when draped with the rich tapestry of words, would lend shape and strong coherence to the whole. All other art must simply minister light and fragrance; it might be studied, indeed, but easily and superficially; not that it would not be better, perhaps, if he could have approached other arts with penetrating insight; but he felt that for himself, with his limitations, his feebleness, his faltering grasp, nothing must come between him and his literary preoccupation. The other arts might feed his soul indeed, but he could not serve them. He found that he took great delight, and was always at ease, in the company of musicians and painters, because he could understand and interpret their point of view, their att.i.tude of mind; while on the other hand he could approach them with the humility, the perceptive humility, which the artist desires as an atmosphere; he did not know enough about the technical points to controvert and differ, while he knew enough to feel inspired by the tense feeling of secrets, understood and practised, which were yet hidden from ordinary eyes.

Art, then, and music became for Hugh as a sweet and remote ill.u.s.tration of his own consecration--and indeed there were moments when, wearied by his own strenuous toil, ploughing sadly through the dreary sands of labour, that must close at intervals round the feet of the serious craftsman, the sight of a picture hanging perhaps in a room full of cheerful company, or the sound of music--a few bars rippling from an open window, or stealing in faint gusts from the b.u.t.tressed window of a church lighted for evensong--came to him like a sacred cup, carried in the hovering hands of a ministering angel, revealing to him the delicate hidden joy of beauty of which he had almost lost sight in his painful hurrying to some appointed end. _Hinc lucem et pocula sacra_, said the old motto of Cambridge. The light was clear enough, and led him forward, as it led the pilgrim of old, s.h.i.+ning across a very wide field. But the holy refreshment that was tendered him upon the way, this was the blessed gift of those other arts which he dared not to follow, but which he knew held within themselves secrets as dear as the art which in his loneliness he pursued.

x.x.xV

Artistic Susceptibility--An Apologia--Temperament--Criticism of Life--The Tangle

Hugh had found himself one evening in the Combination-room of his college, in a little group of Dons who were discussing with great subtlety and ardour the question of retaining Greek in the entrance examinations of the university. It seemed to Hugh that the arguments employed must be identical with those that might formerly have been used to justify the retention of Hebrew in the curriculum--the advisability of making acquaintance at first hand with a n.o.ble literature, the mental discipline to be obtained; ”Greek has such a n.o.ble grammar!” said one of these enthusiasts. Hugh grew a little nettled at the tone of the discussion. The defenders of Greek seemed to be so impervious to facts which told against them. They erected their theories, like umbrellas, over their heads, and experience pattered harmlessly on the top. Hugh advanced his own case as an instance of the failure, of the melancholy results of a cla.s.sical curriculum. It was deplorable, he said, that he should have realised, as he did when he left the university, that his real education had then to begin. He had found himself totally ignorant of modern languages and modern history, of science, and indeed of all the ideas with which the modern world was teeming. The chief defender of Greek told him blithely that he was indulging the utilitarian heresy; that the object of his education had been to harden and perfect his mind, so as to make it an instrument capable of subtle appreciation and ardent self-improvement. When Hugh pleaded the case of immense numbers of boys who, after they had been similarly perfected and hardened, had been left, not only ignorant of what they had been supposed to be acquiring, but without the slightest interest in or appreciation of intellectual or artistic ideas at all, he was told that, bad as their case was, it would have been still worse if they had not been subjected to the refining process. Hugh, contrary to his wont, indulged in a somewhat vehement tirade against the neglect of the appreciative and artistic faculties in the case of the victims of a cla.s.sical education.