Beside Still Waters, Arthur Christopher Benson [good books for high schoolers .txt] 📗

character, and still more of the stubborn power of character in resisting influences. Poetry was to him a region in which one became aware of strange and almost magical forces, which came floating out of unknown and mysterious depths--it was a world of half-heard echoes, momentary glimpses, mysterious appeals. In history and in biography one saw more of the interacting forces of temperament; but in poetry, as the interpreter of nature, one found oneself among cries and thrills which seemed to rise from the inner heart of the world. It was the same with religion; but here the forces at work so often lost their delicacy and subtlety by being compounded with grosser human influences, entangled with superstitions, made to serve low and pitiful ends. In poetry there was none of this--it was the most disinterested thing in the world. In the pure medium of words, coloured by beauty and desire, all the remote, holy, sweet secrets of the heart were blended into a rising strain; and it was well to submit oneself, tranquilly and with an open heart, to the calling of these sweet voices.

Hugh was aware that his view was not what would be called a practical one; that he had no fibre of his being that responded to what were called civic claims, political urgencies, social reforms, definite organisations; he felt increasingly that these things were but the cheerful efforts of well-meaning and hard-headed persons to deal with the bewildering problems, the unsatisfactory debris of life. Hugh felt that the only possible hope of regeneration and upraising lay in the individual; and that if the tone of individual feeling could be purified and strengthened, these organisations would become mere unmeaning words. The things that they represented seemed to Hugh unreal and even contemptible, the shadows cast on the mist by the evil selfishnesses, the stupid appetites, the material hopes of men. As simplicity of life and thought became more and more dear to him, he began to recognise that, though there was no doubt room in the world, as it was, for these other busy and fertile ideas, yet that his own work did not lie there. Rather it lay in defining and classifying his own life and experience; in searching for indubitable motives, and noble possibilities that had almost the force of certainties; of gathering up the secrets of existence, and speaking them as frankly, as ardently, as melodiously as his powers would admit, if by any means he might awaken other hearts to the truths which had for him so sweet and constraining an influence.


XXXIII

Music--Church Music--Musicians--The Organ--False Asceticism

An art which had for Hugh an almost divine quality was the art of music; an art dependent upon such frail natural causes, the vibration of string and metal, yet upon the wings of which the soul could fly abroad further than upon the wings of any other art. There was a little vignette of Bewick's, which he had loved as a child, where a minute figure sits in a tiny horned and winged car, in mid air, throwing out with a free gesture the reins attached to the bodies of a flight of cranes; the only symbol of his destination a crescent moon, shining in dark skies beyond him. That picture had always seemed to Hugh a parable of music, that it gave one power to fly upon the regions of the upper air, to use the wings of the morning.

And yet, if one analysed it, what a totally inexplicable pleasure it was. Part of it, the orderly and rhythmical beat of metre, such as comes from striking the fingers on the table, or tapping the foot upon the floor; how deep lay the instinct to bring into strict sequence, where it was possible, the mechanical movements of nature, the creaking of the boughs of trees, the drip of water from a fountain-lip, the beat of rolling wheels, the recurrent song of the thrush on the high tree; and then there came in the finer sense of intricate vibration. The lower notes of great organ-pipes had little indeed but a harsh roar, that throbbed in the leaded casements of the church; but climbing upwards they took shape in the delicate noises, the sounds and sweet airs of which Prospero's magic isle was full. And yet the rapture of it was inexpressible in words. Sometimes those airy flights of notes seemed to stimulate in some incomprehensible way the deepest emotions of the human spirit; not indeed the intellectual and moral emotions, but the primal and elemental desires and woes of the heart.

Hugh could hardly say in what region of the soul this all took place. It seemed indeed the purest of all emotions, for the mind lost itself in a delight which hardly even seemed to be sensuous at all, because, in the case of other arts, one was conscious of pleasure, conscious of perception, of mingling identity with the thing seen or perceived; but in music one was rapt almost out of mortality, in a kind of bodiless joy.

One of Hugh's causes of dissatisfaction with the education he had received was that, though he had a considerable musical gift, he had never been taught to play any musical instrument. Partly indolence and partly lack of opportunity had prevented him from attaining any measure of skill by his own exertions, though he had once worked a little, very fitfully, at the theory of music, and had obtained just enough knowledge of the composition of chords to give him an intelligent pleasure in disentangling the elements of simple progressions. Another trifling physical characteristic had prevented his hearing as much music as he would have wished. The presence of a crowd, the heat and glare of concert-rooms, the uncomfortable proximity of unsympathetic or possibly even loquacious persons, combined with a dislike of fixed engagements outside of the pressure of official hours of work, had kept him, very foolishly, from musical performances. Thus almost the only music with which he had a solid acquaintance was ecclesiastical music; he had been accustomed as a boy to frequent the cathedral services in the town where he was at school; and in London he constantly went on Sundays to St. Paul's or Westminster. It was no doubt the stately _mise-en-scene_ of these splendid buildings that affected Hugh as much even as the music itself, though the music was like the soul's voice speaking gently from beautiful lips. Hugh always, if he could, approached St. Paul's by a narrow lane among tall houses, that came out opposite the north transept. At a certain place the grey dome became visible, strangely foreshortened, like a bleak mountain-head, and then there appeared, framed by the house-fronts, the sculptured figure of the ancient lawgiver, with a gesture at once vehement and dignified, that crowned the top of the pediment. Then followed the hush of the mighty church, the dumb falling of many foot-falls upon the floor, the great space of the dome, in which the mist seemed to float, the liberal curves, the firm proportions of arch and pillar; the fallen daylight seemed to swim and filter down, stained with the tincture of dim hues; the sounds of the busy city came faintly there, a rich murmur of life; then the soft hum of the solemn bell was heard, in its vaulted cupola; and then the organ awoke, climbing from the depth of the bourdon; the movement of priestly figures, the sweet order of the scene, the sense of high solemnity, made a shrine for the holy spirit of beauty to utter its silvery voice. In Westminster it was different; the richer darkness, the soaring arches, the closer span, the incredible treasure of association and memory made it a more mysterious place, but the sound lacked the smothered remoteness that gave such a strange, repressed economy to the music of St. Paul's. At Westminster it was more cheerful, more tangible, more material. But the tranquillising, the inspiring effect upon the spirit was the same. Perhaps it was not technical religion of which Hugh was in search. But it was the religion which was as high above doctrine and creed and theology as the stars were above the clouds. The high and holy spirit inhabiting eternity seemed to emerge from the metaphysic, the science of religion, from argument and strife and dogma, as the moon wades, clear and cold, out of the rack of dusky vapours. Such a voice, as that gentle, tender, melancholy, and still joyful voice, that speaks in the 119th Psalm, telling of misunderstanding and persecution, and yet dwelling in a further region of peace, came speeding into the very labyrinth of Hugh's troubled heart. "I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost; O seek thy servant, for I do not forget Thy commandments." It was not inspiration, not a high-hearted energy, that music brought with it; it was rather a reconciliation of all that hurt or jarred the soul, an earnest of intended peace.

But, after all, this was not music pure and simple; it was music set in a rich frame of both sensuous and spiritual emotions. Hugh realised that music had never played a large part in his life, but had been one of many artistic emotions that had spoken to him in divers manners. There was one fact about music which lessened its effect upon Hugh, and that was the fact that it seemed to depend more than other arts upon what one brought to it. In certain moods, particularly melancholy moods, when the spirit was fevered by dissatisfaction or sorrow, its appeal was irresistible; it came flying out of the silence, like an angel bearing a vial of fragrant blessings. It came flooding in, like the cool brine over scorched sands, smoothing, refreshing, purifying. There seemed something direct, authentic, and divine about the message of music in such moods; there seemed no interfusion of human personality to distract, because the medium was more pure.

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 casement 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