Hugh: Memoirs of a Brother Part 9

I spent some strange solitary days at Hare Street in the week which followed, going over from Cambridge and returning, working through papers and letters. There were all Hugh's ma.n.u.scripts and notes, his books of sermons, all the written evidences of his ceaseless energy. It was an astonishing record of diligence and patient effort. It seemed impossible to believe that in a life of perpetual travelling and endless engagements he yet had been able to accomplish all this ma.s.s of work.

His correspondence too--though he had evidently destroyed all private spiritual confidences--was of wide and varied range, and it was difficult to grasp that it yet represented the work of so comparatively few years. The acc.u.mulation also of little, unknown, unnamed gifts was very great, while the letters of grief and sympathy which I received from friends of his, whose very names were unknown to me, showed how intricate and wide his personal relations had been. And yet he had carried all this burden very lightly and easily. I realised how wonderful his power must have been of storing away in his mind the secrets of many hearts, always ready to serve them, and yet able to concentrate himself upon any work of his own.

In his directions he spoke of his great desire to keep his house and chapel as much as possible in their present state. "I have spent an immense amount of time and care on these things," he said. It seemed that he had nearly realised his wish, by careful economy, to live at Hare Street quietly and without anxiety, even if his powers had failed him; and it was strange to walk as I did, one day when I had nearly finished my task, round about the whole garden, which had been so tangled and weed-choked a wilderness, and the house at first so ruinous and bare, and to realise that it was all complete and perfect, a setting of order and peace. How insecure and frail the beautiful hopes of permanence and quiet enjoyment all seemed! I pa.s.sed over the smooth lawn, under the leafless limes, through the yew-tree walk to the orchard, where the grave lay, with the fading wreaths, and little paths trodden in the gra.s.s; by the hazel hedge and the rose-garden, and the ranked vegetable rows with their dying flower-borders; into the chapel with its fantasy of ornament, where the lamp burned before the shrine; through the house, with its silent panelled rooms all so finely ordered, all prepared for daily use and tranquil delight. It seemed impossible that he should not be returning soon in joyful haste, as he used to return, pleased to show his new designs and additions. But I could not think of him as having any shadow of regret about it all, or as coming back, a pathetic _revenant_, to the scene of his eager inventiveness.

That was never his way, to brood over what had been done. It was always the new, the untouched, the untried, that he was in search of. Hugh never wished that he had done otherwise, nor did he indulge in the pa.s.sion of the past, or in the half-sad, half-luxurious retrospect of the days that are no more. "Ah," I could fancy him saying, "that was all delightful while it lasted--it was the greatest fun in the world! But now!"--and I knew as well in my heart and mind as if he had come behind me and spoken to me, that he was moving rapturously in some new experience of life and beauty. He loved indeed to speak of old days, to recall them vividly and ecstatically, as though they were actually present to him; and I could think of him as even delighting to go over with me those last hours of his life that we spent together, not with any shadow of dread or shrinking, but just as it pleased Odysseus to tell the tale of how he sped down the whirlpool, with death beneath and death above, facing it all, taking it all in, not cherishing any delusion of hope, and yet enjoying it as an adventure of real experience which it was good to have tasted even so.

And when I came to look at some of his letters, and saw the sweet and generous things which he had said of myself in the old days, his grat.i.tude for trifling kindnesses and gifts which I had myself forgotten, I felt a touch of sorrow for a moment that I had not been even nearer to him than I was, and more in his enlivening company; and I remembered how, when he arrived to see me, he would come lightly in, say a word of greeting, and plunge into talk of all that we were doing; and then I felt that I must not think of him unworthily, as having any grievance or shadow of concern about my many negligences and coldnesses: but that we were bound by ties of lasting love and trust, and shared a treasure of dear memories and kindnesses; and that I might leave his spirit in its newly found activities, take up my own task in the light of his vivid example, and look forward to a day when we might be again together, sharing recollection and purpose alike, as cheerfully and gladly as we had done in the good days that were gone, with all the added joy of the new dawn, and with the old understanding made more perfect.

XVIII

PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

Hugh was always youthful-looking for his age, light and quick in movement, intent but never deliberate, pa.s.sing very rapidly from one thing to another, impatient of boredom and dullness, always desiring to do a thing that very minute. He was fair of complexion, with grey-blue eyes and a shock head of light hair, little brushed, and uncut often too long. He was careless of appearances, and wore clothes by preference of great shabbiness. He told me in 1909 that he had only bought one suit in the last five years. I have seen him, when gardening at Hare Street, wear a pair of shoes such as might have been picked up in a ditch after a tramp's encampment. At the same time he took a pleasure of a boyish kind in robes of state. He liked his Monsignor's purple, his red-edged ca.s.sock and crimson cincture, as a soldier likes his uniform. He was in no way ascetic; and though he could be and often seemed to be wholly indifferent to food, yet he was amused by culinary experiments, and collected simple savoury recipes for household use. He was by far the quickest eater I have ever seen. He was a great smoker of cheap cigarettes. They were a natural sedative for his highly strung temperament. I do not, think he realised how much he smoked, and he undoubtedly smoked too much for several years.

He was always quick, prompt, and decisive. He had an extraordinary presence of mind in the face of danger. My sister remembers how he was once strolling with her, in his ca.s.sock, in a lane near Tremans, when a motor came down the road at a great pace, and Roddy, the collie, trotted out in front of it, with his back turned to the car, unconscious of danger. Hugh took a leap, ran up hill, s.n.a.t.c.hed Roddy up just in front of the wheels, and fell with him against the hedge on the opposite side of the road.

He liked a degree of comfort, and took great pleasure in having beautiful things about him. "I do not believe that lovely things should be stamped upon," he once wrote to a friend who was urging the dangers of a strong sense of beauty; adding, "should they not rather be led in chains?" Yet his taste was not at all severe, and he valued things for their a.s.sociations and interest as much as he did for their beauty. He had a great acc.u.mulation of curious, pretty, and interesting things at Hare Street, and took a real pleasure in possession. At the same time he was not in the least dependent on such things, and could be perfectly happy in bare and ugly rooms. There was no touch of luxuriousness about him, and the adornment of his house was one of the games that he played.

One of his latest amus.e.m.e.nts was to equip and catalogue his library. He was never very much of a reader, except for a specific purpose. He read the books that came in his way, but he had no technical knowledge of English literature. There were many English cla.s.sics which he never looked into, and he made no attempt to follow modern developments. But he read books so quickly that he was acquainted more or less with a wide range of authors. At the same time he never wasted any time in reading books which did not interest him, and he knew by a sort of intuition the kind of books he cared about.

He was of late years one of the liveliest and most refreshing of talkers. As a boy and a young man he was rather silent than otherwise in the family circle, but latterly it was just the opposite. He talked about anything that was in his mind, but at the same time he did not wish to keep the talk in his own hands, and had an eager and delighted recognition of his companion's thoughts and ideas.

His sense of humour was unfailing, and when he laughed, he laughed with the whole of himself, loudly and contagiously, abandoning himself with tears in his eyes to helpless paroxysms of mirth. There was never the smallest touch of affectation or priggishness about his att.i.tude, and he had none of the cautious and uneasy reverence which is apt to overshadow men of piety. He was intensely amused by the humorous side of the people and the inst.i.tutions which he loved. Here are two slight ill.u.s.trations which come back to my mind. He told me these two stories in one day at Tremans. One was that of a well-known Anglican Bishop who attended a gathering of clergy, and in his valedictory speech said that they would expect him to make some allusion to the fact that one who had attended their last meeting was no longer of the Anglican communion, having joined the Church of Rome. They would all, he said, regret the step which he had thought fit to take; but they must not forget the serious fall their poor friend had had from his bicycle not long before, which had undoubtedly affected gravely his mental powers. Then he told me of an unsatisfactory novice in a religious house who had been expelled from the community for serious faults. His own account of it was that the reason why he was expelled was that he used to fall asleep at meditation, and snore so loud that he awoke the elder brethren.

Though Hugh held things sacred, he did not hold them inconveniently sacred, and it did not affect their sacredness if they had also a humorous side to them. He had no temptation to be easily shocked, and though he hated all impure suggestiveness, he could be amused by what may be called broad humour. I always felt him to be totally free from prudishness, and it seemed to me that he drew the line in exactly the right place between things that might be funny and unrefined, and things which were merely coa.r.s.e and gross. The fact was that he had a perfectly simple manliness about him, and an infallible tact, which was wholly unaffected, as to the limits of decorum. The result was that one could talk to him with the utmost plainness and directness. His was not a cloistered and secluded temperament. He knew the world, and had no fear of it or shrinking from it.

He dearly loved an argument, and could be both provoking and incisive.

He was vehement, and hated dogmatic statements with which he did not agree. When he argued, he used a good deal of gesture, waving his hands as though to clear the air, emphasising what he said with little sweeps and openings of his hands, sometimes covering his face and leaning forwards, as if to gain time for the onset. His arguments were not so much clear as ingenious, and I never knew anyone who could defend a poor case so vigorously. When he was strained and tired, he would argue more tenaciously, and employ fantastic ill.u.s.trations with great skill; but it always blew over very quickly, and as a rule he was good-tempered and reasonable enough. But he liked best a rapid and various interchange of talk. He was bored by slow-moving and solemn minds, but could extract a secret joy from pompous utterances, while nothing delighted him more than a full description of the exact talk and behaviour of affected and absurd people.

His little stammer was a very characteristic part of his manner. It was much more marked when he was a boy and a young man, and it varied much with his bodily health. I believe that it never affected him when preaching or speaking in public, though he was occasionally nervous about its doing so. It was not, so to speak, a long and leisurely stammer, as was the case with my uncle, Henry Sidgwick, the little toss of whose head as he disengaged a troublesome word, after long dallying with a difficult consonant, added a touch of _friandise_ to his talk.

Hugh's stammer was rather like a vain attempt to leap over an obstacle, and showed itself as a simple hesitation rather than as a repet.i.tion. He used, after a slight pause, to bring out a word with a deliberate emphasis, but it never appeared to suspend the thread of his talk. I remember an occasion, as a young man, when he took sherry, contrary to his wont, through some dinner-party; and when asked why he had done this, he said that it happened to be the only liquid the name of which he was able to p.r.o.nounce on that evening. He used to feel humiliated by it, and I have heard him say, "I'm sorry--I'm stammering badly to-night!" but it would never have been very noticeable, if he had not attended to it. It is clear, however, from some of his letters that he felt it to be a real disability in talk, and even fancied that it made him absurd, though as a matter of fact the little outward dart of his head, as he forced the recalcitrant word out, was a gesture which his friends both knew and loved.

He learned to adapt himself to persons of very various natures, and indeed was so eager to meet people on their own ground that it seems to me he was to a certain extent misapprehended. I have seen a good many things said about him since his death which seem to me to be entire misinterpretations of him, arising from the simple fact that they were reflections of his companion's mood mirrored in his own sympathetic mind. Further, I am sure that what was something very like patient and courteous boredom in him, when he was confronted with some sentimental and egotistical character, was interpretated as a sad and remote unworldliness. Someone writing of him spoke of his abstracted and far-off mood, with his eyes indwelling in a rapture of hallowed thought.

This seems to me wholly unlike Hugh. He was far more likely to have been considering how he could get away to something which interested him more.

Hugh's was really a very fresh and sparkling nature, never insipid, intent from morning to night on a vital enjoyment of life in all its aspects. I do not mean that he was always wanting to be amused--it was very far from that. Amus.e.m.e.nt was the spring of his social mood; but he had a pa.s.sion too for silence and solitude. His devotions were eagerly and rapturously practised; then he turned to his work. "Writing seems to 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 antic.i.p.ating. 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 pa.s.sive 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 a.s.saults 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 G.o.d. 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 n.o.ble sacrifice, and it is often n.o.bly 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 did not lie in that direction. But though he was modest and not at all self-a.s.sertive, 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 circ.u.mstances 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."