Hugh, Arthur Christopher Benson [beach books TXT] 📗

did not lie in that direction. But though he was modest and not at all self-assertive, he never had the least submissiveness nor subservience; nor was he capable of making any pretences.

Sometimes it seems to happen that men are punished for wilfulness of choice by missing great opportunities. A nature which cannot compromise anything, cannot ignore details, cannot work with others, is sometimes condemned to a fruitless isolation. But it would be wrong to disregard the fact that circumstances more than once came to Hugh's aid; I see very clearly how he was, so to speak, headed off, as by some Fatherly purpose, from wasting his life in ineffectual ways. Probably he might have worked on at the Eton Mission, might have lost heart and vigour, might never have discovered his real powers, if he had not been rescued. His illness at this juncture cut the knot for him; and then followed a time of travel in Egypt, in the Holy Land, which revived again his sense of beauty and width and proportion.

And then followed his Kemsing curacy; I have a letter written to me from Kemsing in his first weeks there, in which he describes it as a paradise and says that, so far as he can see, it is exactly the life he most desires, and that he hopes to spend the rest of his days there.

But now I feel that he took a very real step forward. The danger was that he would adopt a dilettante life. He had still not discovered his powers of expression, which developed late. He was only just beginning to preach with effect, and his literary power was practically undeveloped. He might have chosen to live a harmless, quiet, beauty-loving life, kindly and guileless, in a sort of religious aestheticism; though the vivid desire for movement and even excitement that characterised his later life would perhaps have in any case developed.

But something stronger and sterner awoke in him. I believe that it was exactly because the cup, mixed to his taste, was handed to him that he was able to see that there was nothing that was invigorating about the potion. It was not the community life primarily which drew him to Mirfield; it was partly that his power of speech awoke, and more strongly still the idea of self-discipline.

And so he went to Mirfield, and then all his powers came with a rush in that studious, sympathetic, and ascetic atmosphere. He was in his twenty-eighth year. He began by finding that he could preach with real force and power, and two years later, when he wrote _The Light Invisible_, he also discovered his gift of writing; while as a little recreation, he took up drawing, and produced a series of sketches, full of humour and delicacy, drawn with a fine pen and tinted with coloured chalk, which are at all events enough to show what he could have done in this direction.


XX


ATTAINMENT

And then Hugh made the great change of his life, and, as a Catholic, found his dreams realized and his hopes fulfilled. He found, indeed, the life which moves and breathes inside of every faithful creed, the power which supplements weakness and represses distraction, the motive for glad sacrifice and happy obedience. I can say this thankfully enough, though in many ways I confess to being at the opposite pole of religious thought. He found relief from decision and rest from conflict. He found sympathy and confidence, a sense of corporate union, and above all a mystical and symbolical devotion embodied in a great and ancient tradition, which was visibly and audibly there with a movement like a great tide, instead of a scheme of worship which had, he thought, in the Anglican Church, to be eclectically constructed by a group or a circle. Every part of his nature was fed and satisfied; and then, too, he found in the Roman Catholic community in England that sort of eager freemasonry which comes of the desire to champion a cause that has won a place for itself, and influence and respect, but which is yet so much opposed to national tendencies as to quicken the sense of active endeavour and eager expectation.

After his quiet period of study and thought in Rome and at Llandaff House, came the time when he was attached to the Roman Catholic Church in Cambridge; and this, though not congenial to him, gave him an insight into methods and conditions; and all the while his own forces and qualities were learning how to concentrate and express themselves. He learned to write, he learned to teach, to preach, to speak, to be his own natural self, with all his delicate and ingenuous charm, in the presence of a great audience; so that when at last his opportunity came to free himself from official and formal work, he was able to throw all his trained faculties into the work which he had at heart. Moreover, he found in direction and confession, and in careful discussion with inquirers, and in sympathetic aid given to those in trouble, many of the secret sorrows, hopes, and emotions of the human heart, so that his public work was enforced and sustained by his ever-increasing range of private experience.

He never, however, took whole-heartedly to pastoral work. He said frankly that he "specialised" in the region of private direction and advice; but I doubt if he ever did quite enough general pastoral work of a commonplace and humdrum kind to supplement and fill out his experience of human nature. He never knew people under quite normal conditions, because he felt no interest in normal conditions. He knew men and women best under the more abnormal emotion of the confessional; and though he used to maintain, if challenged, that penitence was a normal condition, yet his judgment of human beings was, as a consequence, several times gravely at fault. He made some unwise friendships, with a guileless curiosity, and was obliged, more than once, to extricate himself by summary abandonments.

He wrote of himself once, "I am tired to death of giving myself away, and finding out too late.... I don't like my tendency to agree with people wildly; my continual fault has been to put on too much fuel." Like all sensitive people, who desire sympathetic and friendly relations, he was apt to discover the best of new acquaintances at once, and to evoke in them a similarly genial response. It was not till later, when the first conciliatory impulse had died down, that he discovered the faults that had been instinctively concealed, and indeed repressed by his own personal attractiveness.

He had, too, an excessive confidence in his power of managing a critical situation, and several times undertook to reform people in whom corruption had gone too far for remedy. He believed in his power of "breaking" sinners by stern declarations; but he had more than once to confess himself beaten, though he never wasted time in deploring failures.

Mr. Meynell, in his subtle essay which prefaces my brother's little book of poems, speaks of the complete subjugation of his will. If I may venture to express a different view, I do not feel that Hugh ever learned to efface his own will. I do not think his temperament, was made on the lines of self-conquest. I should rather say that he had found the exact _milieu_ in which he could use his will to the best effect, so that it was like the charge of powder within the gun, no longer exploding itself vaguely and aimlessly, but all concentrated upon one intense and emissive effort. Because the one characteristic of the last years of his life was his immense enjoyment of it all. He wrote to a friend not long before the end, when he was feeling the strain upon him to be heavier than he could bear; after a word or two about the war--he had volunteered to go to the front as a chaplain--he said, "So I am staying here as usual; but the incessant demands on my time try me as much as shrapnel and bullets." That sentence seems to me to confirm my view that he had not so much sacrificed as devoted himself. He never gained a serene patience; I have heard him over and over again speak with a sigh of his correspondence and the demands it made on him; yet he was always faithful to a relation once formed; and the number of letters written to single correspondents, which have been sent me, have fairly amazed me by their range, their freshness, and their fulness. He was deeply interested in many of the letters he received, and gave his best in his prompt replies; but he evidently also received an immense number of letters from people who did not desire guidance so much as sympathy and communication. The inconsiderate egotism of unimaginative and yet sensitive people is what creates the burden of such a correspondence; and though he answered his letters faithfully and duly, and contrived to say much in short space, yet he felt, as I have heard him say, that people were merciless; and much of the time he might have devoted to creative work, or even to recreation, was consumed in fruitless toil of hand and mind. And yet I am sure that he valued the sense that he could be useful and serviceable, and that there were many who depended upon him for advice and consolation. I believe that his widespread relations with so many desirous people gave him a real sense of the fulness and richness of life; and its relations. But for all that, I also believe that his courtesy and his sense of duty were even more potent in these relations than the need of personal affection. I do not mean that there was any hardness or coldness about him; but he valued sympathy and tranquil friendship more than he pursued intimacy and passionate devotion. Yet in the last year or two of his life, I was both struck and touched by his evident desire to knit up friendships which had been severed, and to renew intercourse which had been suspended by his change of belief. Whether he had any feeling that his life was precarious, or his own time short, I do not know. He never said as much to me. He had, of course, used hard words of the Church which he had left, and had said things which were not wholly impersonal. But, combative though he was, he had no touch of rancour or malice in his nature, and he visibly rejoiced in any sign of goodwill.

Yet even so, he was essentially solitary in mind. "When I am alone," he once wrote, "I am at my best; and at my worst in company. I am happy and capable in loneliness; unhappy, distracted, and ineffective in company." And again he wrote, "I am becoming more and more afraid of meeting people I want to meet, because my numerous deficiencies are so very apparent. For example, I stammer slightly always and badly at times."

This was, I believe, more an instinctive shrinking from the expenditure of nervous force than anything else, and arose from the feeling that, if he had to meet strangers, some brilliancy of contribution would be expected of him. I remember how he delighted in the story of Marie Bashkirtseff, who, when she was summoned to meet a party of strangers who desired to see her, prayed as she entered the room, "Oh God, make me worth seeing!" Hugh disliked the possibility of disappointing expectations, and thus found the society of unfamiliar people a strain; but in family life, and with people whom he knew well, he was always the most delightful and charming of companions,