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Beside Still Waters, a fiction by Arthur C. Benson |
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Chapter 16. Humanity--Individuality--The Average |
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_ Chapter XVI. Humanity--Individuality--The Average Hugh, one Sunday, in walking alone outside Cambridge, went for some considerable time behind a party of young men and boys, who were out for a stroll. He observed them with a disgustful curiosity. They were over-dressed; they talked loudly and rudely, and, so far as Hugh could hear, both coarsely and unamusingly. They laughed boisterously, they made offensive remarks about humble people who passed them. It was the height of humour to push each other unexpectedly into the ditch at the side of the road, and then their laughter became uproarious. It was harmless enough, but it was all so ugly and insolent, that Hugh thought that he had seldom seen anything which was so singularly and supremely unattractive. The performance seemed to have no merit in it from any point of view. These youths were no doubt exulting in the pride of their strength, but the only thing that they really enjoyed was that the people who met them should be disconcerted and distressed. Making every allowance for thoughtlessness and high spirits, it seemed unnecessary that these qualities should manifest themselves so unpleasingly. Hugh wondered whether, as democracy learned its strength, humanity was indeed becoming more vulgar, more inconsiderate, more odious. Singly, perhaps, these very boys might be sensible and good-humoured people enough, but association seemed only to develop all that was worst in them. And yet they were specimens of humanity at its strongest and cheerfullest. They were the hope of the race--for the same thing was probably going on all over England--and they would no doubt develop into respectable and virtuous citizens; but the spectacle of their joy was one that had no single agreeable feature. These loutish, rowdy, loud-talking, intolerable young men were a blot upon the sweet day, the pleasant countryside. Probably, Hugh thought, there was something sexual beneath it all, and the insolence of the group was in some dim way concerned with the instinct for impressing and captivating the female heart. Perhaps the more demure village maidens who met them felt that there was something dashing and even chivalrous about these young squires. There came into Hugh's mind the talk of a friend who had been staying with him, a man of lofty socialistic ideals, who spoke much and eloquently of the worship of humanity. Reflecting upon the phrase, Hugh felt that he could attach no sort of meaning to it. What was the humanity that one was to worship? Was it the glory of the average man? was it the memory of the past? was it the possibility of the future? It seemed to Hugh to be an impossible abstraction. He had said as much to his friend, who had replied that it was like the worship of Nature, which Hugh himself practised. But Hugh replied that he did not worship Nature at all. There was much in Nature that he did not understand, much that he feared and disliked. There was an abundance of beautiful things in Nature, beautiful objects, beautiful moments; but it was the beautiful in Nature that he worshipped, not Nature as a whole; there was enough, he said, in Nature that was desirable, to give him a kind of hope that there was some high and beautiful thought behind it; at which his friend became eloquent, veiling, Hugh thought, a great confusion of mind behind a liberal use of rhetoric, and spoke of suffering, toiling, sorrowing, onward-looking humanity, its impassioned relations, its great wistful heart. Hugh again, could not understand him; he thought that his friend had formed some exotic and fanciful conception, arrived at by subtracting from humanity all that was not pathetic and solemn and dignified, and then fusing the residue into a sort of corporeal entity. He did not see any truth or reality about the conception. It seemed to him as unreal as though one had personified the Great Western Railway into a sort of gigantic form, striding westward, covered with packages of merchandise, and carrying a typical human being, as St. Christopher carried the sacred child across the flood. It was pure Anthropomorphism. Hugh could understand a personal relation, even the passionate idealisation of an individual. He could conceive of the latter as giving one a higher idea of the possibilities of the human race: but to lump a vast and complex system together, to concentrate unknown races, dead and living, negroes, Chinamen, Homeric heroes and palaeolithic men, into one definite conception, and to worship it, seemed to Hugh an almost grotesque thought. He could conceive of a species of Pantheism, in which the object of one's awe and worship was the vast force underlying all existing things; but even so it seemed necessary to Hugh to focus it all into one personal force. The essence of worship seemed to Hugh to be that the thing worshipped should have unity and individuality. It seemed to him as impossible to worship a thing of which he himself was a part, as to demand that a cat should adore the principle of felinity. The essence of the world, of life, to Hugh lay in the sense of his own individuality. He was instinctively conscious of his own existence, he was experimentally conscious of the existence of a complicated world outside of him. But it was to him rather a depressing than an ennobling thought, that he was one of a class, fettered by the same disabilities, the same weaknesses, as millions of similar objects. Perhaps it was a wholesome humiliation, but it was none the less humiliating. On the one hand he was conscious of the vast power of imagination, the power of standing, as it were, side by side with God upon the rampart of heaven, and surveying the whole scheme of created things. Yet on the other hand there fell the sense of a baffling and miserable impotence, a despairing knowledge that one's consciousness of the right to live, and to live happily, was conditioned by one's utter frailty, the sense that one was surrounded by a thousand dangers, any one of which might at any moment deprive one of the only thing of which one was sure. How, and by what subtle process of faith and imagination, could the two thoughts be reconciled? The best that Hugh could make of the ardent love of life and joy which inspired him, was the belief that it was implanted in man, that he might have, for some inscrutable reason, a motive for experiencing, and for desiring to continue to experience, the strange discipline of the world. If men did not love life and ease so intensely, at the first discouragement, at the first touch of pain, they would languidly and despairingly cease to be. Hugh seemed to discern that men were put into the world that they might apprehend something that it was worth their while to apprehend; that for some reason which he had no means of divining, life could not be a wholly easy or pleasurable thing; but that in order to inspire men to bear pain and unhappiness, they were permeated with an intense desire to continue to live, and to regain some measure of contentment, if that contentment were for a time forfeited. Of course there were many things which that did not explain, but it was a working theory that seemed to contain a large element of truth. Sometimes a technically religious person would say that the world was created for the glory of God, a phrase which filled Hugh with a sense of bewildered disgust. It either implied that God demanded recognition, or that it was all done in a species of intolerable pride of heart, as a mere exhibition of power. That God should yield to a desire for display seemed to Hugh entirely inconsistent with a belief in His awful supremacy. It seemed to him rather that God must have abundant cause to be dissatisfied with the world as it was, but that at the same time He must have some overpoweringly just reason for acquiescing for a time in its imperfection. How else could one pray, or aspire, or hope at all? But the sight of human beings, such as Hugh had before his eyes that day, filled him with perplexity. One was only possessed by an intense desire that they might be different from what they were. Hugh indeed knew that he himself had sore need to be different from what he was. But the qualities that lay behind the motions and speech of these lads--inconsiderateness, indifference to others, vanity, grossness--were the things that he had always been endeavouring to suppress and eradicate in himself; they were the things that were detested by poets, saints, and all chivalrous and generous souls. Sometimes indeed one was confronted, in the world of men, by a perfectly sincere, noble, quiet, gentle, loving personality; and then one perceived, as in a gracious portrait, what humanity could hope to aspire to. But on the other hand Hugh had seen, in the pages of a periodical, an attempt to arrive at a typical human face, by photographing a number of individuals upon the same plate; and what a blurred, dim, uncomfortable personality seemed to peer forth! To worship humanity seemed to Hugh like trying to worship this concentrated average; and he had little hope that, if an absolutely average man were constructed, every single living individual contributing his characteristics to the result, the result would be edifying, encouraging, or inspiring. Hugh feared that the type would but sink the most tolerant philosopher in a sense of irreclaimable depression. And yet if, guided by prejudice and preference, one made up a figure that one could wholly admire, how untrue to nature it would be, how different from the figure that other human beings would consent to admire! The problem was insoluble; the only way was to set one's self courageously at one's own little corner of the gigantic scheme, to attack it as faithfully as one could, by humble aspirations, quiet ministries, and tender-hearted sympathy; to take as simply as possible whatever message of beauty and hope fell to one's share; not to be absorbed in one's own dreams and imaginings, but to interpret faithfully every syllabic of the great Gospel; and, above all, to remember that work was inevitable, necessary, and even beautiful; but that it only had the noble quality, when it was undertaken for the love of others, and not for love of oneself. _ |
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