Chapter 32. Classical Education--Mental Discipline...

________________________________________________
_ Chapter XXXII. Classical Education--Mental Discipline--Mental Fertilisation--Poetry--The August Soul--The Secret of a Star--The Voice of the Soul--Choice Studies--Alere Flammam

Hugh found that, as he grew older, he tended to read less, or rather that he tended to recur more and more to the familiar books. He had always been a rapid reader, and had followed the line of pure pleasure, rather than pursued any scheme of self-improvement. He became aware, particularly at Cambridge, that he was by no means a well-informed man, and that his mind was very incompletely furnished. He was disposed to blame his education for this, to a certain extent; it had been almost purely classical; he had been taught a little science, a little mathematics, and a little French; but the only history he had done at school had been ancient history, to illustrate the classical authors he had been reading; and the result had been a want of mental balance; he knew nothing of the modern world or the movement of European history; the whole education had in fact been linguistic and literary; it had sacrificed everything to accuracy, and to the consideration of niceties of expression. It might have been urged that this was in itself a training in the art of verbal expression; but here it seemed to Hugh that the whole of the training had confined itself to the momentary effect, the ring of sentences, the adjustment of epithets, and that he had received no sort of training in the art of structure. He had never been made to write essays or to arrange his materials. He thought that he ought to have been taught how to deal with a subject; but his exercises had been almost wholly translations from ancient classical languages. He had been taught, in fact, how to manipulate texture, but never how to frame a design. The result upon his reading had been that he had always been in search of phrases, of elegant turns of expression and qualification, but he had never learnt how to apprehend the ideas of an author. He had not cared to do this for himself, and from the examination point of view it had been simply a waste of time. All that he had ever tried to do had been so to familiarise himself with the style, the idiosyncrasies of authors, that he might be able to reproduce such superficial effects in his compositions, or to disentangle a passage set for translation. He had not arrived at any real mastery of either Greek or Latin, and it seemed to him, reflecting on this process long afterwards, that the system had encouraged in him a naturally faulty and dilettante bent in literature. In reading, for instance, a dialogue of Plato, he had never cared to follow the argument, but only to take pleasure in beautiful, isolated thoughts and images; in reading a play of Sophocles, he had cared little about the character-drawing or the development of the dramatic situation; he had only striven to discover and recollect extracts of gnomic quality, sonorous flights of rhetoric, illustrative similes.

The same tendency had affected all his own reading, which had lain mostly in the direction of _belles-lettres_ and literary annals; and, in the course of his official life, literature had been to him more a beloved recreation than a matter of mental discipline. The result had been that he found himself, in the days of his emancipation, with a strong perception of literary quality, and a wide knowledge of poetical and imaginative literature; he had, too, a considerable acquaintance with the lives of authors; and this was all. He could read French with facility, but with little appreciation of style. Both German and Italian were practically unknown to him.

Hugh made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship, of a young Fellow of a neighbouring college, whose education had been conducted on entirely different lines. This young man had been educated privately, his health making it impossible for him to go to school. He had read only just enough classics to enable him to pass the requisite examinations, and he had been trained chiefly in history and modern languages. He had taken high honours in history at Cambridge, and had settled down as a historical lecturer. As this friendship increased, and as Hugh saw more and more of his friend's mind, he began to realise his own deficiencies. His friend had an extraordinary grasp of political and social movements. He was acquainted with the progress of philosophy and with the development of ideas. It was a brilliant, active, well-equipped intellect, moving easily and with striking lucidity in the regions of accurate knowledge. Sometimes, in talking to his friend, Hugh became painfully aware of the weakness of his own slouching, pleasure-loving mind. It seemed to him that, in the intellectual region, he was like a dusty and ragged tramp, permeated on sunshiny days with a sort of weak, unsystematic contentment, dawdling by hedgerow-ends and fountain-heads, lying in a vacant muse in grassy dingles, and sleeping by stealth in the fragrant shadow of hayricks; while his friend seemed to him to be a brisk gentleman in a furred coat, flashing along the roads in a motor-car, full of useful activity and pleasant business. His friend's idea of education was of a strict and severe mental discipline; he did not over-estimate the value of knowledge, but regarded facts and dates rather as a skilled workman regards his bright and well-arranged tools. What he did above all things value was a keen, acute, clear, penetrating mind, which arrayed almost unconsciously the elements of a problem, and hastened unerringly to a conclusion. The only point in which Hugh rated his own capacity higher, was in a certain relish for literary effect. His friend was a great reader, but Hugh felt that he himself possessed a power of enjoyment, an appreciation of colour and melody, a thrilled delight in what was artistically excellent, of which his friend seemed to have little inkling.

His friend could classify authors, and could give off-hand a brilliant and well-sustained judgment on their place in literary development, which fairly astonished Hugh. But the difference seemed to be that his friend had mastered books with a sort of gymnastic agility, and that his mind had reached an astonishing degree of technical perfection thereby; but Hugh felt that to himself books had been a species of food, and that his heart and spirit had gained some intensity from them, some secret nourishment, which his friend had to a certain extent missed.

Hugh had been so stirred on several occasions by a sense of shame at realising the impotence and bareness of his own mind, that he laid down an ambitious scheme of self-improvement, and attacked history with a zealous desire for his own mental reform. But he soon discovered that it was useless. Such an effort might have been made earlier in life, before habits had been formed of desultory enjoyment, but it was in vain now. He realised that accurate knowledge simply fell through his mind like a shower of sand; a little of it lodged on inaccessible ledges, but most of it was spilt in the void. He saw that his only hope was to strengthen and enlarge his existing preferences, and that the best that he could hope to arrive at was to classify and systematise such knowledge as he at present possessed. It was too late to take a new departure, or to aim at any completeness of view. The mental discipline that he required, and of which he felt an urgent need, must be attained by a diligent sorting of his own mental stores, haphazard and disjointed as they were. And after all, he felt, there was room in the world for many kinds of minds. Mental discipline from the academical point of view was a very important thing, perhaps the thing that the ordinary type of public schoolboy was most in need of. But there was another province too, the province of mental appreciation, and it was in this field that Hugh felt himself competent to labour. It seemed to him that there were many young men at the university, capable of intellectual pleasure, who had been starved by the at once diffuse and dignified curriculum of classical education. Hugh felt that he himself had been endowed with an excess of the imaginative and artistic quality, and that, owing to natural instincts and intellectual home-surroundings, he had struck out a path for himself; books had been to Hugh from his earliest years channels of communication with other minds. He could not help doubting whether they ever developed qualities or delights that did not naturally exist in a rudimentary form in the mind which fell under their influences. He could not, in looking back, trace the originating power of any book on his own mind; the ideas of others had rather acted in fertilising the germs which lay dormant in his own heart. They had deepened the channels of his own thoughts, they had revealed him to himself; but there had always been, he thought, an unconscious power of selection at work; so that uncongenial ideas, unresponsive thoughts, had merely danced off the surface without affecting any lodgment. He had gained in taste and discrimination, but he could not trace any impulse from literature which had set him exploring a totally unfamiliar region. Sometimes he had resolutely submitted his mind to the leadership of a new author; but he had always known in his heart that the pilgrimage would be in vain. He felt that he would have gained if he had known this more decisively, and if he had spent his energies more faithfully in pursuing what was essentially congenial to him.

There were certain authors, certain poets who, he had instinctively felt from the outset, viewed life, nature, and art from the same standpoint as himself. His mistake had been in not defining that standpoint more clearly, but in wandering vaguely about, seeking for a guide, for way-posts, for beaten tracks. What he ought to have done was to have fixed his eyes upon the goal, and fared directly thither.

But this misdirected attempt, over which he wasted some precious months, to enlarge the horizon of his mind, had one valuable effect. It revealed to him at last what the object of his search was. He became aware that he was vowed to the pursuit of beauty, of a definite and almost lyrical kind. He saw that his mind was not made to take in, with a broad and vigorous sweep, the movement of human endeavour; he saw that he had no conception of wide social or political forces, of the development of communities, of philosophical ideals. These were great and high things, and his studies gave him an increased sense of their greatness and significance. But Hugh saw that he could neither be a historian nor a philosopher, but that his work must be of an individualistic type. He saw that the side of the world which appealed to himself was the subtle and mysterious essence of beauty--the beauty of nature, of art, of music, of comradeship, of relations with other souls. The generalisations of science had often a great poetical suggestiveness; but he had no vestige of the scientific temper which is content to deduce principles from patient and laborious investigation. He saw that his own concern must be with the emotions and the hearts of his fellows, rather than with their minds; that if he possessed any qualities at all, they were of a poetical kind. The mystery of the world was profound and dark, though Hugh could see that science was patiently evolving some order out of the chaos. But the knowledge of the intricate scheme was but a far-off vision, an august hope; and meanwhile men had to meet life as they could, to evolve enough hopefulness, enough inspiration from their complicated conditions to enable them to live a full and vigorous life.

Poetry, to give a large name to the various interpretations of subtle beauty, could offer in some measure that hope, that serenity; could lend the dignity to life which scientific investigations tended to sweep away. Science seemed to reveal the absolute pettiness, the minute insignificance of all created things, to show how inconsiderable a space each separate individual occupied in the sum of forces; the thought weighed heavily upon Hugh that he was only as the tiniest of the drops of water in a vast cataract that had rushed for thousands of years to the sea; it was a paralysing conception. It was true that the water-drop had a definite place; yet it was the outcome and the victim of monstrous forces; it leapt from the mountain to the river, it ran from the river to the sea; it was spun into cloud-wreaths; it fell on the mountain-top again; it was perhaps congealed for centuries in some glacier-bed; then it was free again to pursue its restless progress. But to feel that one was like that, was an unutterably dreary and fatiguing thought. The weary soul perhaps was hurried thus from zone to zone of life, never satisfied, never tranquil; with a deep instinct for freedom and tranquillity, yet never tranquil or free. Then, into this hopeless and helpless prospect, came the august message of poetry, revealing the transcendent dignity, the solitariness, the majesty of the indomitable soul; bidding one remember that though one was a humble atom in a vast scheme, yet one had the sharp dividing sense of individuality; that each individual was to himself the measure of all things, a fortress of personality; that one was not merely whirled about in a mechanical order; but that each man was as God Himself, able to weigh and survey the outside scheme of things, to approve and to disapprove; and that the human will was a mysterious stronghold, impregnable, secure, into which not even God Himself could intrude unsummoned. How small a thing to the eye of the scientist were the human passions and designs, the promptings of instinct and nature; but to the eye of the poet how sublime and august! These tiny creatures could be dominated by emotions--love, honour, patriotism, liberty--which could enable them, frail and impotent as they were, to rise majestically above the darkest and saddest limitations of immortality. They could be racked with pain, crushed, tormented, silenced; but nothing could make them submit, nothing could force them to believe that their pains were just. Herein lay the exceeding dignity of the human soul, that it could arraign its Creator before its own judgment-seat, and could condemn Him there. It could not, it seemed, refuse to be called into being, but, once existent, it could obey or not as it chose. Its joys might be clouded, its hopes shattered, but it need not acquiesce; and this power of rebellion, of criticism, of questioning, seemed to Hugh one of the most astonishing and solemn things in the world. And thus to Hugh the history of the individual, the aspirations and longings of mankind, seemed to contain a significance, a sanctity that nothing could remove.

He did not believe that this rebellious questioning was justified, but this did not lessen his astonishment at the fact that the human soul could claim a right to decide, by its own intuitions, what was just and what was unjust, and could accuse the Eternal Lord of Life of not showing it enough of the problem for it to be able to acquiesce in the design, as it desired to do. Hugh believed that he was justified in holding that as Love was the strongest power in the world, the Creator and Inspirer of that love probably represented that quality in the supremest degree, though this was an inference only, and not supported by all the phenomena of things. But it seemed to him the one clue through the darkness; and this secret hope was perhaps the highest and best thought that came to him from searching the records of humanity and the conceptions of mortal minds.

And therefore Hugh felt that he was on the side of the individual; and that he touched life in that relation. Literature then must be for him, in some form or other, an attempt to quicken the individual pulse, to augment the individual sense of significance. He must abstain from what was probably a higher work; but he must not lose faith thereby. He must set himself with all his might to preach a gospel of beauty to minds which, like his own, were incapable of the larger mental sweep, and could only hope to disentangle the essence of the moment, to refine the personal sensation. That was the noble task of high literature, of art, of music, of the contemplation of nature, that it could give the mind a sense of largeness, of dim and wistful hope, of ultimate possibilities. The star that hung in the silent heaven--it was true that it was the creation of mighty forces, that it had a place, a system, a centrifugal energy, a radiation of its own. That was in a sense the message of a star; but it had a further appeal, too, to the imaginative mind, in that it hung a glowing point of ageless light, infinitely remote, intolerably mysterious, a symbol of all the lustrous energies of the aspiring soul. And in one sense indeed the pure imagination could invest such vast creatures of God with even a finer, freer charm than scientific apprehension. Science could indicate its bulk, its motions, its distance, even analyse its very bones; but it could do no more; while the spirit could glide, as in an aerial chariot, through the darkness of the impalpable abyss, draw nearer and nearer in thought to the vast luminary, see unscathed its prodigious vents spouting flame and smoke, and hear the roar of its furnaces; or softly alight upon fields of dark stones, and watch with awe the imagined progress of forms intolerably huge, swollen as with the bigness of nightmare. Here was the strange contrast, that science was all on fire to learn the truth; while the incomprehensible essence of the soul, with its limitless visions, was capable of forming conceptions which the truth should disappoint. And here again came in a strange temptation. If life and identity were to be indefinitely prolonged, then Hugh had no wish but to draw nearer to the truth, however hard and even unpalatable it might be; but if, on the other hand, this life were all, then it seemed that one might be even the happier for comfortable and generous delusions.

Hugh, then, felt that if the old division of more highly developed minds was the true one; if one was either Aristotelian or Platonist, that is to say, if one's tendencies were either scientific or idealistic, there was no doubt on which side of the fight he was arrayed; not that he thought of the two tendencies as antagonistic; and if indeed the scientific mind tended to contemn the idealistic mind, as concerning itself with fancies rather than with facts, he felt that there could not be a greater mistake than for the idealistic mind to contemn the scientific. Rather, he thought, the idealists should use the scientific toilers as patient, humble, and serviceable people, much as the Dorian conquerors of Sparta used the Helots, and encourage them to perform the necessary and faithful work of investigation for which the idealists were unfitted. The mistake which men of scientific temper made, Hugh thought, was to concern themselves only or mainly, with material phenomena. The idealistic and imaginative tendencies of man were just as much realities, and no amount of materialism could obliterate them. What was best of all was to import if possible a scientific temper into idealistic matters; not to draw hasty or insecure generalisations, nor to neglect phenomena however humble. Books then for Hugh were, in their largest aspect, indications and manifestations of the idealistic nature of man. The interest about them was the perceiving of the different angles at which a thought struck various minds, the infusion of personality into them by individuals, the various interpretations which they put upon perceptions, the insight into various kinds of beauty and hopefulness which the writers displayed.

And thus Hugh turned more and more away from the critical apprehension of imaginative literature, to the mystical apprehension of it. A critical apprehension of it was indeed necessary, for it initiated one into the secrets of expression and of structure, in which the force of personality was largely displayed, taking shape from the thought in them, as clothes take shape from their wearers. But deeper still lay the mystical interpretation. In the world of books he heard the voice of the soul, sometimes lamenting in desolate places, sometimes singing blithely to itself, as a shepherd sings upon a headland, in sight of the blue sea; sometimes there came a thrill of rapture into the voice, when the spirit was filled to the brim with the unclouded joys of the opening world, the scent of flowers, the whispering of foliage in great woods, the sweet harmonies of musical chords, the glance of beloved eyes, or the accents of some desired voice; and then again all this would fade and pale, and the soul would sit wearied out, lamenting its vanished dreams and the delicate delights of the springtime, in some wild valley overhung with dark mountains, under the dreadful and inscrutable eye of God. Life, how insupportable, how beautiful it seemed! Full of treasures and terrors alike, its joys and its woes alike unutterable. The strangest thing of all, that the mind of man was capable of seeing that there was a secret, a mystery about it all; could desire so passionately to know it and to be satisfied, and yet forbidden even dimly to discern its essence.

What, after all, Hugh reflected, was the end of reading? Not erudition nor information, though many people seemed to think that this was a meritorious object. Professed historians must indeed endeavour to accumulate facts, and to arrive if possible at a true estimate of tendencies and motives; the time had not yet come, said the most philosophical historians, for any deductions to be drawn as to the development of the mind of the world, the slow increase of knowledge and civilisation; and yet that was the only ultimate value of their work, to attempt, namely, to arrive at the complex causes and influences that determined the course of history and progress. Hugh felt instinctively that his mind, impatient, inaccurate, subtle rather than profound, was ill adapted for such work as this. He felt that it was rather his work to arrive, if he could, at a semi-poetical, semi-philosophical interpretation of life, and to express this as frankly as he could. And thus reading must be for him an attempt to refine and quicken his insight into the human mind, working in the more delicate regions of art. He must study expression and personality; he must keep his spirit sensitive to any hint of truth or beauty, any generous and ardent intuition, any grace and seemliness of thought. He was fond of books of travel, as opening to him a larger perspective of human life, and revealing to him the conclusions to which experience and life had brought men of other nationalities and other creeds. Biography was his most beloved study, because it opened out to him the vast complexity of human motive; but he thought that its chief value had been in revealing to him the extraordinary part that conventional and adopted beliefs and motives played in the majority of lives.

His reading, then, began to have for him a deep and special significance. He was no philosopher; he found that the metaphysical region, where one stumbled among the dim ultimate causes of things, only gave him a sense of insecurity and despair; but he was in a sense a psychologist; his experience of life had taught him to have an inkling of the influences that affect 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. _

Read next: Chapter 33. Music--Church Music--Musicians...

Read previous: Chapter 31. A Man Of Science--Prophets...

Table of content of Beside Still Waters


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book