Hugh, Arthur Christopher Benson [beach books TXT] 📗

me now the only thing worth doing in the world," he says in one of his letters when he was deep in a book. Then he flung himself into gardening and handicraft, back again to his writings, or his correspondence, and again to his prayers.

But it is impossible to select one of his moods, and to say that his true life lay there. His life lay in all of them. If work was tedious to him, he comforted himself with the thought that it would soon be done. He was an excellent man of affairs, never "slothful in business," but with great practical ability. He made careful bargains for his books, and looked after his financial interests tenaciously and diligently, with a definite purpose always in his mind. He lived, I am sure, always looking forward and anticipating. I do not believe he dwelt at all upon the past. It was life in which he was interested. As I walked with my mother about the beautiful garden, after his funeral, I said to her: "It seems almost too pathetic to be borne that Hugh should just have completed all this." "Yes," she said, "but I am sure we ought to think only that it meant to him seven years of very great happiness." That was perfectly true! If he had been called upon to leave Hare Street to take up some important work elsewhere, he would certainly not have dwelt on the pathetic side of it himself. He would have had a pang, as when he kissed the doorposts of his room at Mirfield on departing. But he would have gone forward, and he would have thought of it no more. He had a supreme power of casting things behind him, and he was far too intent on the present to have indulged in sentimental reveries of what had been.

It is clear to me, from what the doctors said after his death, that if the pneumonia which supervened upon great exhaustion had been averted, he would have had to give up much of his work for a long time, and devote himself to rest and deliberate idleness. I cannot conceive how he would have borne it. He came once to be my companion for a few days, when I was suffering from a long period of depression and overwork. I could do nothing except answer a few letters. I could neither write nor read, and spent much of my time in the open air, and more in drowsing in misery over an unread book. Hugh, after observing me for a little, advised me to work quite deliberately, and to divide up my time among various occupations. It would have been useless to attempt it, for Nature was at work recuperating in her own way by an enforced listlessness and dreariness. But I have often since then thought how impossible it would have been for him to have endured such a condition. He had nothing passive about him; and I feel that he had every right to live his life on his own lines, to neglect warnings, to refuse advice. A man must find out his own method, and take the risks which it may involve. And though I would have done and given anything to have kept him with us, and though his loss is one which I feel daily and constantly, yet I would not have it otherwise. He put into his life an energy of activity and enjoyment such as I have rarely seen. He gave his best lavishly and ungrudgingly. Even the dreadful and tragical things which he had to face he took with a relish of adventure. He has told me of situations in which he found himself, from which he only saved himself by entire coolness and decisiveness, the retrospect of which he actually enjoyed. "It was truly awful!" he would say, with a shiver of pleasing horror. But it was all worked into a rich and glowing tapestry, which he wove with all his might, and the fineness of his life seems to me to consist in this, that he made his own choices, found out the channels in which his powers could best move, and let the stream gush forth. He did not shelter himself fastidiously, or creep away out of the glare and noise. He took up the staff and scrip of pilgrimage, and, while he kept his eyes on the Celestial City, he enjoyed every inch of the way, as well the assaults and shadows and the toils as the houses of kindly entertainment, with all their curious contents, the talk of fellow-pilgrims, the arbours of refreshment, until his feet touched the brink of the river, and even there he went fearlessly forward.


XIX


RETROSPECT

Now that I have traced the progress of Hugh's outer life from step to step, I will try to indicate what in the region of mind and soul his progress was, and I would wish to do this with particular care, even it the risk of repeating myself somewhat, because I believe that his nature was one that changed in certain ways very much; it widened and deepened greatly, and most of all in the seven last years of his life, when I believe that he found himself in the best and truest sense.

As a boy, up to the age of eighteen or nineteen, it was, I believe, a vivid and unreflective nature, much absorbed in the little pattern of life as he saw it, neither expansive nor fed upon secret visions. It was always a decided nature. He never, as a child, needed to be amused; he never said, "What shall I do? Tell me what to do!" He liked constant companionship, but he had always got little businesses of his own going on; he joined in games, and joined keenly in them, but if a public game was not to his taste, he made no secret that he was bored, and, if he was released, he went off on his own errands. I do not remember that he ever joined in a general game because of any sociable impulse merely, but because it amused him; and if he separated himself and went off, he had no resentment nor any pathetic feeling about being excluded.

When he went on to school he lived a sociable but isolated life. His companions were companions rather than friends. He did not, I think, ever form a romantic and adoring friendship, such as are common enough with emotional boys. He did not give his heart away; he just took a vivid and animated interest in the gossip, the interplay, the factions and parties of his circle; but it was all rather a superficial life--he used to say that he had neither aims nor ambitions--he took very little interest in his work and not much interest in games. He just desired to escape censure, and he was not greedy of praise. There was nothing listless or dreamy about it all. If he neglected his work, it was because he found talk and laughter more interesting. No string ran through his days; they were just to be taken as they came, enjoyed, dismissed. But he never wanted to appear other than he was, or to be admired or deferred to. There was never any sense of pose about hint nor the smallest affectation. He was very indifferent as to what was thought of him, and not sensitive; but he held his own, and insisted on his rights, allowed no dictation, followed no lead. All the time, I suppose, he was gathering in impressions of the outsides of things--he did not dip beyond that: he was full of quite definite tastes, desires, and prejudices; and though he was interested in life, he was not particularly interested in what lay behind it. He was not in the least impressionable, in the sense that others influenced or diverted him from his own ideas.

Neither had he any strong intellectual bent. The knowledge which he needed he acquired quickly and soon forgot it. I do not think he ever went deeply into things in those early days, or tried to perfect himself in any sort of knowledge. He was neither generous nor acquisitive; he was detached, and always rather apt to put his little possessions away and to forget about them. It was always the present he was concerned with; he did not deal with the past nor with the future.

Then after what had been not so much a slumber of the spirit as a vivid living among immediate impressions, the artistic nature began to awake in him. Music, architecture, ceremony, began to make their appeal felt; and he then first recognised the beauty of literary style. But even so, he did not fling himself creatively into any of these things at first, even as an amateur; it was still the perception of effects that he was concerned with.

It was then, during his first year at Cambridge, that the first promptings of a vocation made themselves felt towards the priesthood. But he was as yet wholly unaware of his powers of expression; and I am sure that his first leanings to the clerical life were a search for a quiet and secluded fortress, away from the world, in which he might pursue an undisturbed and ordered life of solemnity and delicate impressions of a sacred sort of beauty. His desire for community life was caused by his decided dislike of the world, of fuss and tedium and conventional occupations. He was never in the least degree a typical person. He had no wish to be distinguished, or to influence other minds or lives, or to gain honour or consideration. These things simply appeared to him as not worth striving for. What he desired was companionship of a sympathetic kind and the opportunity of living among the pursuits he liked best. He never wished to try experiments, and it was always with a spectacular interest that he regarded the world.

His call was very real, and deeply felt, and he waited for a whole year to make sure of it; but he found full decision at last.

Then came his first ministerial work at the Eton Mission; and this did not satisfy him; his strength emerged in the fact that he did not adopt or defer to the ideals he found about him: a weaker character would have embraced them half-heartedly, tried to smother its own convictions, and might have ended by habituating itself to a system. But Hugh was still, half unconsciously, perhaps, in search of his real life; he did not profess to be guided by anyone, nor did he ever suspend his own judgment as to the worth of what he was doing; a manly and robust philanthropy on Christian lines was not to his taste. His instinct was rather for the beautiful element in religion and in life, and for a mystical consecration of all to God. That did not seem to him to be recognised in the work which he was doing. If he had been less independent, he might have crushed it down, and come to view it as a private fancy. He might have said to himself that it was plain that many human spirits did not feel that more delicate appeal, and that his duty was to meet other natures on some common ground.

It is by such sacrifices of personal bias that much of the original force of the world is spoiled and wasted. It may be a noble sacrifice, and it is often nobly made. But Hugh was not cast in that mould. His effectiveness was to lie in the fact that he could disregard many ordinary motives. He could frankly admire other methods of work, and yet be quite sure that his own powers