It is said that no artist is ever really interested in another artist's work. My brothers, Fred and Hugh, my sister and myself would sometimes be at home together, and all writing books. Hugh was, I think, always the first inclined to produce his work for inspection; but we had a tacit convention which was not in the least unsympathetic, not to feel bound to be particularly interested in each other's books. My books, I felt, bored Hugh more than his bored me; but there was this advantage, that when we read each other's books, as we often did, any critical praise that we could offer was much more appreciated than if we had felt bound to proffer conventional admiration. Hugh once told me that he envied my sostenuto; but on another occasion, when I said I had nothing to write about, and feared I had written too many books, Hugh said: "Why not write a book about having nothing to write about?" It was good advice and I took it. I can remember his real and obvious pleasure when I once praised Richard Raynal to him with all my might. But though he enjoyed praise, it was always rather because it confirmed his own belief that his work was worth doing. He did not depend in the smallest degree either upon applause or sympathy. Indeed, by the time that a book was out, he had generally got another on the stocks, and did not care about the previous one at all.



Neither do I think that his books emanated from a high artistic ideal. I do not believe that he was really much interested in his craft. Rather he visualised a story very vividly, and then it seemed to him the finest fun in the world to spin it all as rapidly as he could out of his brain, to make it all alert with glancing life. It was all a personal confession; his books bristle with his own dreams, his own dilemmas, his own social relations; and when he had once firmly realised the Catholic attitude, it seemed to him the one thing worth writing about.

While I write these pages I have been dipping into The Conventionalists. It is full of glow and drama, even melodrama; but somehow it does not recall Hugh to my mind. That seems strange to me, but I think of him as always larger than his books, less peremptory, more tolerant, more impatient of strain. The book is full of strain; but then I remember that in the old days, when he played games, he was a provoking and even derisive antagonist, and did not in the least resent his adversaries being both; and I come back to my belief in the game, and the excitement of the game. I do not, after all, believe that his true nature flowed quite equably into his books, as I think it did into The Light Invisible and Richard Raynal. It was a demonstration, and he enjoyed using his skill and adroitness; he loved to present the smouldering and flashing of passions, the thrill and sting of which he had never known. Saved as he was by his temperament alike from deep suffering and tense emotion, and from any vital mingling either with the scum and foam or with the stagnancy and mire of life, the books remain as a brilliant illusion, with much of the shifting hues and changing glimmer of his own ardent and restless mind rippling over the surface of a depth which is always a little mysterious as to the secrets it actually holds.



XV

FAILING HEALTH

Hugh's health on the whole was good up to the year 1912, though he had a troublesome ailment, long ignored, which gave him a good deal of malaise. He very much disliked being spoken to about his health, and accepted no suggestions on the subject. But he determined at the end of 1912, after enduring great pain, to have an operation, which was quite successful, but the shock of which was considerable. He came down to Tremans just before, and it was clear that he suffered greatly; but so far from dreading the operation, he anticipated it with a sense of immense relief, and after it was over, though he was long unwell, he was in the highest spirits. But he said after he came back from Rome that he felt ten years older; and I can recall his coming down to Cambridge not long after and indulging one evening in an immense series of yawns, for which he apologised, saying, "I'm tired, I'm tired—not at the top, but deep down inside, don't you know?"



But it was not until 1914 that his health really declined. He came over to Cambridge at the beginning of August, when the war was impending. He stayed with me over the Sunday; he was tired and overstrained, complained that he felt unable to fix his mind upon anything, and he was in considerable depression about the possibility of war. I have never seen him so little able to throw off an anxiety; but he dined in Hall with me on the Sunday night, met some old friends, and was full of talk. He told me later in the evening that he was in much anxiety about some anonymous menace which he had received. He would not enter into details, but he spoke very gravely about it. However, later in the month, I went over with a friend to see him at Hare Street, and found him in cheerful spirits in spite of everything. He had just got the place, he said, into perfect order, and now all it wanted was to be left alone. It was a day of bright hot sunlight, and we lunched out of doors near the chapel under the shade of the yew trees. He produced a peculiar and pleasant wine, which he had made on the most scientific principles out of his own grapes. We went round and looked at everything, and he showed me the preparation for the last adornment, which was to be a rose garden near the chapel. We walked into the orchard and stood near the Calvary, little thinking that he would be laid to rest there hardly two months later.

The weeks passed on, and at the end of September I went to stay near Ambleside with some cousins, the Marshalls, in a beautiful house called Skelwith Fold, among lovely woodlands, with the mountains rising on every side, and a far-off view down Langdale. Here I found Hugh staying. He was writing some Collects for time of war, and read many of them aloud to me for criticism. He was also painting in oils, attempting very difficult landscapes with considerable success. They stood drying in the study, and he was much absorbed in them; he also was fishing keenly in a little trout lake near the house, and walking about with a gun. His spirits were very equable and good. But he told me that he had gone out shooting in September over some fields lent him by a neighbour, and had had to return owing to breathlessness; and he added that he suffered constantly from breathlessness and pain in the chest and arms, that he could only walk a few paces at a time, and then had to rest to recover his breath. He did not seem to be anxious about it, but he went down one morning to celebrate Mass at Ambleside, refusing the offer of the car, and found himself in such pain that he then and there went to a doctor, who said that he believed it to be indigestion.

He sat that morning after breakfast with me, smoking, and complaining that the pain was very severe. But he did not look ill; and the pain suddenly left him. "Oh what bliss!" he said. "It's gone, suddenly and entirely—and now I must go out and finish my sketch."

The only two things that made me feel anxious were that he had given up smoking to a considerable extent, and that he said he meant to consult our family doctor; but he was so lively and animated—I remember one night the immense zest and intensity with which he played a game of throwing an old pack of cards across the room into the grate—that it was impossible to think that his condition was serious.

Indeed, I said good-bye to him when he went off, without the least anticipation of evil. My real hope was that he would be told he had been overdoing it, and ordered to rest; and a few days later, when I heard that this was what the doctor advised, I wrote to him suggesting that he should come and settle at Cambridge for a couple of months, do exactly what he liked, and see as much or as little of people as he liked. It seems that he showed this letter to one of the priests at Manchester, and said, "There, that is what I call a real invitation—that is what I shall do!"

Dr. Ross-Todd saw him, and told him that it was a neuralgic affection, "false angina," and that his heart was sound, but that he must diminish his work. He pleaded to be allowed to finish his imminent engagements; the doctor said that he might do that, if he would put off all subsequent ones. This was wisely done, in order to reassure him, as he was an excitable though not a timid patient. He was at Hare Street for a day or two, and his trusted servant, Mr. Reeman, tells me that he seemed ill and out of spirits. The last words he said as he drove away, looking round the lime-encircled lawn, were, "Ah! the leaves will all be gone when I come home again."

He preached at Salford on October 4, and went to Ulverston on October 5, where he conducted a mission. On October 10 he returned, and Canon Sharrock says that he arrived in great pain, and had to move very slowly. But he preached again on October 11, though he used none of the familiar gestures, but stood still in the pulpit. He suffered much after the sermon, and rested long in a chair in the sacristy. He started to go to London on the Monday morning, but had to return in the taxi, feeling too ill to travel. Then followed days of acute pain, during which he no doubt caught a severe chill. He could not sleep, and he could only obtain relief by standing up. He wandered restlessly one night about the corridors, very lightly clad, and even went out into the court. He stood for two or three hours leaning on the mantelpiece of his room, with Father Gorman sitting near him, and trying in vain to persuade him to retire to bed.

When he was not suffering he was full of life, and even of gaiety. He went one of these afternoons, at his own suggestion, to a cinema show with one of the priests, but though he enjoyed it, and even laughed heartily, he said later that it had exhausted him.

He wrote some letters, putting off many of his autumn and winter engagements. But he grew worse; a specialist was called in, and, though the diagnosis was entirely confirmed, it was found that pneumonia had set in.



XVI

THE END

I had spent a long day in London at a business meeting, where we discussed a complicated educational problem. I came away alone; I was anxious to have news of my sister, who had that morning undergone a slight operation; but I was not gravely disquieted, because no serious complications were expected.

When I reached my house there were two telegrams awaiting me, one to say that the operation had gone well, the other from Canon Sharrock, of Salford, to say that my brother was dangerously ill of pneumonia. I wired at once for a further report, and before it arrived made up my mind that I must go to him. I waited till the reply came—it was a little more favourable—went up to London, and caught a midnight train for Manchester.

The news had the effect which a sudden shock is apt to have, of inducing a sense of curious unreality. I neither read nor slept, nor even thought coherently. I was just aware of disaster and fear. I was alone in my compartment. Sometimes we passed through great, silent, deserted stations, or stopped outside a junction for an express to pass. At one or two places there was a crowd of people, seeing off a party of soldiers, with songs and cheers. Further north I was aware at one time that the train was labouring up a long incline, and I had a faint sense of relief when suddenly the strain relaxed, and the train began to run swiftly and smoothly downwards; I had just one thought, the desire to reach my brother, and over and over again the dread of what I might hear.

It was still dark and chilly when I arrived at Manchester. The great station was nearly empty. I drove hurriedly through dimly-lit streets. Sometimes great factories towered up, or dark house-fronts shuttered close. Here there were high steel networks of viaducts overhead, or parapets of bridges over hidden waterways. At last I came to where a great church towered up, and an iron-studded door in a blank wall appeared. I was told this was the place, and pushing it open I went up a stone-flagged path, among beds of soot-stained shrubs, to where a lantern shone in the porch of a sombre house. There was a window high up on the left, where a shaded lamp was burning and a fire flickered on the ceiling, and I knew instinctively that this was my brother's room. I rang, and presently a weary-eyed, kindly priest, in a hastily-donned cassock, appeared. He said at once that my brother was a little better and was asleep. The doctors were to see him at nine. I asked where I could go, and he advised a hotel hard by. "We did not expect you," he said, "or we would have had a room ready, but now I fear we could hardly make you comfortable."

I went to the hotel, a big, well-equipped place, and was taken to a bedroom, where I slept profoundly, out of utter weariness. Then I went down to the Bishop's House again at nine o'clock. By daylight Manchester had a grim and sinister air. It was raining softly and the air was heavy with smoke. The Bishop's House stood in what was evidently a poor quarter, full of mean houses and factories, all of red brick, smeared and stained with soot. The house itself appeared like a great college, with paved corridors, dark arches, and many doors. There was a lighted room like a sacristy, and a faint scent of incense drifted in from the door which led into the church. Upstairs, in a huge throne-room with a gilded chair of state and long, bare tables, I met the doctors—Dr. Bradley, a Catholic, and Professor Murray, a famous Manchester physician, in khaki uniform, both most gentle and kind. Canon Sharrock joined us, a tall, robust man, with a beautiful tenderness of manner and a brotherly air. They gave me a better report, but could not disguise from me that things were very critical. It was pneumonia of a very grave kind which had supervened on a condition of overwork and exhaustion. I see now that they had very little hope of recovery, but I did not wholly perceive it then.

Then I went with the Canon to the end of the room. I saw two iron cylinders on the table with brass fittings, and somehow knew that they contained oxygen.

The Canon knocked, and Hugh's voice said, clearly and resonantly, "Come in." I found him in bed, in a big library, the Bishop's own room. There were few signs of illness except a steam-kettle and a few bottles; a nurse was in the adjoining room. He was unable to speak very much, as his throat troubled him; but he was full of humour and brightness. I told him such news as I could think of. He knew that I was very busy, but was pleased that I had come to see him. He said that he felt really better, and that I should be able to go back the next day. He said a few words about a will he had made, but added, "Mind, I don't think I am going to die! I did yesterday, but I feel really better. This is only by way of precaution." We talked about a friend of mine in Manchester, a militant Protestant. "Yes," said Hugh, "he spoke of me the other day as a 'hell-hound'—not very tactful!" He said that he could not sleep for long together, but that he did not feel tired—only bored. I was told I must not stay long with him. He said once or twice, "It's awfully good of you to have come."



I went away after a little, feeling very much reassured. He did not give the impression of being gravely ill at all, he was so entirely himself. I wrote a few letters and then returned, while he ate his luncheon, a baked apple—but this was painful to him and he soon desisted. He talked again a little, with the same liveliness, but as he began to be drowsy, I left him again.

Dr. Bradley soon came to me, and confessed he felt anxious. "It may be a long and critical business," he said. "If he can maintain his strength like this for several days, he may turn the corner—he is a difficult patient. He is not afraid, but he is excitable, and is always asking for relief and suggesting remedies." I said something about summoning the others. "On no account," he said. "It would give him the one impression we must try to avoid—much depends upon his own hopefulness."

I went back to my hotel, slumbered over a book, went in for a little to the cathedral service, and came back about five o'clock. The nurse was not in the room at the moment. Hugh said a few words to me, but had a sudden attack of faintness. I gave him a little whisky at his own request, the doctor was fetched, and there followed a very anxious hour, while various remedies were tried, and eventually oxygen revived him. He laid his head down on the pillow, smiled at me, and said, "Oh, what bliss! I feel absolutely comfortable—it's wonderful."

The doctor beckoned me out, and told me that I had better move my things across to the house and sleep there. "I don't like the look of things at all," he said; "your place is certainly here." He added that we had better wait until the morning before deciding whether the others should be sent for. I moved my things in, and had supper with the priests, who were very kind to me. They talked much about Hugh, of his gaiety and humour; and I saw that he had given his best to these friends of his, and lived with them in brotherly simplicity.

I did not then think he was going to die, and I certainly expected no sudden change. I ought, no doubt, to have realised that the doctors had done their best to prepare me for his death; but the mind has an instinctive way of holding out the shield of hope against such fears.

I was told at this time that he was to be left quiet, so I merely slipped in at ten o'clock. Hugh was drowsy and resting quietly; he just gave me a nod and a smile.

The one thing which made me anxious, on thinking over our interviews in the course of the day was this—that he seemed to have a preoccupation in his mind, though he had spoken cheerfully enough about various matters. It did not seem either a fear or an anxiety. It was rather that he knew that he might die, I now believe, and that he desired to live, and was thinking about all the things he had to do and wished to do, and that his trains of thought continually ended in the thought—"Perhaps I may not live to do them." He wished too, I thought, to reassure himself, and was pleased at feeling better, and at seeing that I thought him better than I had expected. He was a sensitive patient, the doctor said, and often suggested means of keeping up his strength. But he showed no fear at any time, though he seemed like one who was facing a foe; like a soldier in the trenches with an enemy opposite him whom he could not quite discern.

However, I went off to bed, feeling suddenly very tired—I had been for thirty-six hours almost without sleep, and it seemed to me as if whole days had passed since I left Cambridge. My room was far away, a little plain cell in a distant corridor high up. I slept a little; when suddenly, through the glass window above my door, I saw the gleam of a light, and became aware that someone was rapidly drawing near in the corridor. In a moment Canon Sharrock tapped and entered. He said "Mr. Benson, your brother is sinking fast—he has asked for you; he said, 'Is my brother anywhere near at hand?' and when I said yes, that you were in the house, he said, 'Thank God!' Do not lose any time; I will leave the nurse on the stairs to light you." He went out, and I put on a few things and went down the great dark arches of the staircase, with a glimmering light below, and through the throne-room with the nurse. When I came in I saw Hugh sitting up in bed; they had put a chair beside him, covered with cushions, for him to lean against. He was pale and breathing very fast, with the nurse sponging his brow. Canon Sharrock was standing at the foot of the bed, with his stole on, reading the last prayers from a little book. When I entered, Hugh fixed his eyes on me with a strange smile, with something triumphant in it, and said in a clear, natural voice, "Arthur, this is the end!" I knelt down near the bed. He looked at me, and I knew somehow that we understood each other well, that he wanted no word or demonstration, but was just glad I was with him. The prayers began again. Hugh crossed himself faintly once or twice, made a response or two. Then he said: "I beg your pardon—one moment—my love to them all." The big room was brightly lit; something on the hearth boiled over, and the nurse went across the room. Hugh said to me: "You will make certain I am dead, won't you?" I said "Yes," and then the prayers went on. Suddenly he said to the nurse: "Nurse, is it any good my resisting death—making any effort?" The nurse said: "No, Monsignor; just be as quiet as you can." He closed his eyes at this, and his breath came quicker. Presently he opened his eyes again and looked at me, and said in a low voice: "Arthur, don't look at me! Nurse, stand between my brother and me!" He moved his hand to indicate where she should stand. I knew well what was in his mind; we had talked not long before of the shock of certain sights, and how a dreadful experience could pierce through the reason and wound the inner spirit; and I knew that he wished to spare me the pain of seeing him die. Once or twice he drew up his hands as though trying to draw breath, and sighed a little; but there was no struggle or apparent pain. He spoke once more and said: "I commit my soul to God, to Mary, and to Joseph." The nurse had her hand upon his pulse, and presently laid his hand down, saying: "It is all over." He looked very pale and boyish then, with wide open eyes and parted lips. I kissed his hand, which was warm and firm, and went out with Canon Sharrock, who said to me: "It was wonderful! I have seen many people die, but no one ever so easily and quickly."

It was wonderful indeed! It seemed to me then, in that moment, strange rather than sad. He had been himself to the very end, no diminution of vigour, no yielding, no humiliation, with all his old courtesy and thoughtfulness and collectedness, and at the same time, I felt, with a real adventurousness—that is the only word I can use. I recognised that we were only the spectators, and that he was in command of the scene. He had made haste to die, and he had gone, as he was always used to do, straight from one finished task to another that waited for him. It was not like an end; it was as though he had turned a corner, and was passing on, out of sight but still unquestionably there. It seemed to me like the death of a soldier or a knight, in its calmness of courage, its splendid facing of the last extremity, its magnificent determination to experience, open-eyed and vigilant, the dark crossing.



XVII

BURIAL

We had thought that he should be buried at Manchester; but a paper of directions was found saying that he wished to be buried at Hare Street, in his own orchard, at the foot of his Calvary. My mother arrived on the Monday evening, and in the course of Tuesday we saw his body for the last time, in biretta and cassock, with a rosary in his hands. He looked strangely young, like a statue carved in alabaster, with no trace of pain or weariness about him, simply asleep.

His coffin was taken to the midnight train by the clergy of the Salford Cathedral and from Buntingford station by my brother Fred to his own little chapel, where it rested all the Thursday. On the Friday the Cardinal came down, with Canons from Westminster and the choir. A solemn Requiem was sung. The Cardinal consecrated a grave, and he was laid there, in the sight of a large concourse of mourners. It was very wonderful to see them. There were many friends and neighbours, but there were also many others, unknown to me and even to each other, whom Hugh had helped and comforted in different ways, and whose deep and visible grief testified to the sorrow of their loss and to the loyalty of their affection.

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 manuscripts 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 mass 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 accumulation 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 passed 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 grass; 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 passion 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 gratitude 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, passing 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 cassock 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 cassock, 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, snatched 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 associations and interest as much as he did for their beauty. He had a great accumulation 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 amusements 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 classics 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 attitude, 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 institutions which he loved. Here are two slight illustrations 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 coarse 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 illustrations 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 repetition. 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 pronounce 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. Amusement was the spring of his social mood; but he had a passion 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 anticipating. 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 passive 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 assaults 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 God. 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 noble sacrifice, and it is often nobly 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-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, quick, ready, and untiring in talk. And therefore I imagine that, like all artistic people, he found that the pursuit of some chosen train of thought was less of a conscious effort to him than the necessity of adapting himself, swiftly and dexterously, to new people, whose mental and spiritual atmosphere he was obliged to observe and infer. It was all really a sign of the high pressure at which he lived, and of the price he paid for his vividness and animation.

Another source of happiness to him in these last days was his sense of power. This was a part of his artistic nature; and I believe that he enjoyed to the full the feeling of being able to give people what they wanted, to enchant, interest, move, and sway them. This is to some natures a great temptation, because they come to desire applause, and to hunger for tangible signs of their influence. But Hugh was marvellously saved from this, partly by a real modesty which was not only never marred, but which I used to think increased with the years. There is a story of William Morris, that he could read aloud his own poetry, and at the end of a fine stanza would say: "That's jolly!" with an entire freedom from conceit, just as dispassionately as he could praise the work of another. I used to feel that when Hugh mentioned, as I have heard him do, some course of sermons that he was giving, and described the queue which formed in the street, and the aisles and gangways crowded with people standing to hear him, that he did so more impersonally than anyone I had ever heard, as though it were a delightful adventure, and more a piece of good luck than a testimony to his own powers.



It was the same with his books; he wished them to succeed and enjoyed their success, while it was an infinite delight to him to write them. But he had no egotism of a commonplace sort about him, and he never consciously tried to succeed. Success was just the reverberating echo of his own delight.

And thus I do not look upon him as one who had bent and curbed his nature by stern self-discipline to do work of a heavy and distasteful kind; nor do I think that his dangerous devotion to work was the fierce effort of a man who would have wished to rest, yet felt that the time was too short for all that he desired to do. I think it was rather the far more fruitful energy of one who exulted in expressing himself, in giving a brilliant and attractive shape to his ideas, and who loved, too, the varieties and tendencies of human nature, enjoyed moulding and directing them, and flung himself with an intense joy of creation into all the work which he found ready to his hand.



XXI

TEMPERAMENT

Hugh never seemed to me to treat life in the spirit of a mystic or a dreamer, with unshared and secret experiences, withdrawing into his own ecstasy, half afraid of life, rapt away into interior visions. Though he had a deep curiosity about mystical experiences, he was never a mystic in the sense that he had, as great mystics seem to have had, one shell less, so to speak, between him and the unseen. He lived in the visible and tangible world, loving beautiful secrets; and he was a mystic only in the sense that he had an hourly and daily sense of the presence of God. He wished to share his dreams and to make known his visions, to declare the glory of God and to show His handiwork. He found the world more and more interesting, as he came to know it, and in the light of the warm welcome it gave him. He had a keen and delicate apprehension of spiritual beauty, and the Mass became to him a consummation of all that he held most holy and dear. He had recognised a mystical presence in the Church of England, but he found a supernatural presence in the Church of Rome; yet he had, too, the instinct of the poet, to translate into form and substance his inmost and sweetest joy, and to lavish it upon others. No one dares to speak of great poets and seers as men who have profaned a mystery by making it known. The deeper that the poet's sense of beauty is, the more does he thirst to communicate it. It is far too divine and tremendous to be secretly and selfishly enjoyed.

It is possible, of course, that Hugh may have given to those who did not see him constantly in everyday familiar intercourse, the sense of a courteous patience and a desire to do full justice to a claim. Still more may he have given this impression on social occasions and at conventional gatherings. Interviews and so-called festivities were apt to be a weariness to him, because they seemed so great an expenditure of time and force for very scanty results; but I always felt him to be one of the most naturally courteous people I have ever seen. He hated to be abrupt, to repel, to hurt, to wound feelings, to disappoint; yet on such occasions his natural courtesy was struggling with a sense of the waste of time involved and the interruptions caused. I remember his writing to me from the Catholic rectory when he was trying to finish a book and to prepare for a course of sermons, and lamenting that he was "driven almost mad" by ceaseless interviews with people who did not, he declared, want criticism or advice, but simply the luxury of telling a long story for the sake of possible adulation. "I am quite ready to see people," he added, "if only they would ask me to appoint a time, instead of simply flinging themselves upon me whenever it happens to be convenient to them."

I do not think he ever grudged the time to people in difficulties when he felt he could really help and save. That seemed to him an opportunity of using all his powers; and when he took a soul in hand, he could display a certain sternness, and even ruthlessness, in dealing with it. "You need not consult me at all, but if you do you must carry out exactly what I tell you," he could say; but he did grudge time and attention given to mild sentimentalists, who were not making any way, but simply dallying with tragic emotions excitedly and vainly.

This courtesy was part of a larger quality, a certain knightly and chivalrous sense, which is best summed up in the old word "gentleman." A priest told me that soon after Hugh's death he had to rebuke a tipsy Irishman, who was an ardent Catholic and greatly devoted to Hugh. The priest said, "Are you not ashamed to think that Monsignor's eye may be on you now, and that he may see how you disgrace yourself?" To which, he said, the Irishman replied, with perhaps a keener insight into Hugh's character than his director, "Oh no, I can trust Monsignor not to take advantage of me. I am sure that he will not come prying and spying about. He always believed whatever I chose to tell him, God bless him!" Hugh could be hard and unyielding on occasions, but he was wholly incapable of being suspicious, jealous, malicious, or spiteful. He made friends once with a man of morbid, irritable, and resentful tendencies, who had continued, all his life, to make friends by his brilliance and to lose them by his sharp, fierce, and contemptuous animosities. This man eventually broke with him altogether, and did his best by a series of ingenious and wicked letters to damage Hugh's character in all directions. I received one of those documents and showed it to Hugh. I was astonished at his courage and even indifference. I myself should have been anxious and despondent at the thought of such evil innuendoes and gross misrepresentations being circulated, and still more at the sort of malignant hatred from which they proceeded. Hugh took the letter and smiled. "Oh," he said, "I have put my case before the people who matter, and you can't do anything. He is certainly mad, or on the verge of madness. Don't answer it—you will only be drenched with these communications. I don't trouble my head about it." "But don't you mind?" I said. "No," he said, "I'm quite callous! Of course I am sorry that he should be such a beast, but I can't help that. I have done my best to make it up—but it is hopeless." And it was clear from the way he changed the subject that he had banished the whole matter from his mind. At a later date, when the letters to him grew more abusive, I was told by one who was living with him, that he would even put one up on his chimney-piece and point it out to visitors.

I always thought that he had a very conspicuous and high sort of courage, not only in facing disagreeable and painful things, but in not dwelling on them either before or after. This was never more entirely exemplified than by the way he faced his operation, and indeed, most heroically of all, in the way in which he died. There was a sense of great adventure—there is no other word for it—about that, as of a man going on a fateful voyage; a courage so great that he did not even lose his interest in the last experiences of life. His demeanour was not subdued or submissive; he did not seem to be asking for strength to bear or courage to face the last change. He was more like the happy warrior

"Attired With sudden brightness, as a man inspired."



He did not lose control of himself, nor was he carried helplessly down the stream. He was rather engaged in a conflict which was not a losing one. He had often thought of death, and even thought that he feared it; but now that it was upon him he would taste it fully, he would see what it was like. The day before, when he thought that he might live, there was a pre-occupation over him, as though he were revolving the things he desired to do; but when death came upon him unmistakably there was no touch of self-pity or impressiveness. He had just to die, and he devoted his swift energies to it, as he had done to living. I never saw him so splendid and noble as he was at that last awful moment. Life did not ebb away, but he seemed to fling it from him, so that it was not as the death of a weary man sinking to rest, but like the eager transit of a soldier to another part of the field.

"Could it have been avoided?" I said to the kind and gentle doctor who saw Hugh through the last days of his life, and loved him very tenderly and faithfully. "Well, in one sense, 'yes,'" he replied. "If he had worked less, rested more, taken things more easily, he might have lived longer. He had a great vitality; but most people die of being themselves; and we must all live as we are made to live. It was Monsignor's way to put the work of a month into a week; he could not do otherwise—I cannot think of Monsignor as sitting with folded hands."



INDEX

Barnes, Monsignor, 154

Bashkirtseff, Marie, quoted, 249

Bec, Bishop Anthony, 18

Belloc, Mr., 183

Benson, Archbishop (father), 15-17, 20, 46-47, 56, 63, 82, 86, 91, 116; characteristics, 34-39; letters quoted, 53-55, 71-74; ordains his son, 87; death, 97

—— Mrs. (mother), 19, 28, 74-80, 108, 120, 128, 146, 149-150, 182, 209; quoted, 31-32, 118-119, 227; visit to Egypt, 98

—— Fred (brother), 16, 26-27, 34, 68, 80, 184, 209

—— Maggie (sister), 16, 28, 40, 98, 120, 126, 184, 196, 217

—— Martin (brother), 16, 57; death, 35

—— Nelly (sister), 16, 27, 40; death, 79-80

Beth (nurse), 20-24, 39, 106; letter quoted, 23

Bradley, Dr., 200, 201; quoted, 260-261

By What Authority, 114

Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 147

Carter, Archbishop William, 91

Confessions of a Convert, The, 47, 114, 130, 140

Conventionalists, The, 186

Cornish, Mr., 42

Coward, The, 181

Decemviri Club, 156

Donaldson, Archbishop St. Clair, 91, 95

Edward VII; King, 114

Elizabeth, Queen, 179

Eton, influence of, 48-51

—— Mission, 89 seq., 99, 134-136, 236, 238

George V, H. M. King, 98

Gladstone, W. E., 98

—— Mrs., 98

Gore, Bishop, 103, 108-109, 130

Gorman, Father, 194

Halifax, Lord, 128

Hare Street, 168 seq., 189, 193, 210, 227; village, 12

Hill of Trouble, The, 177

Hogg, Sir James McGarel (afterwards Lord Magheramorne), 32

Hormead Mission, 168

Hornby, Provost, 149

House of the Resurrection. See under Mirfield Community

Job, quoted, 49

John Inglesant, 75, 85

Johnson, Dr., quoted, 150, 175

Jowett, B., 150

Kenmare, Lord, 172

Leith, Dr., 67

Light Invisible, The, 106, 177, 187, 240

Lindsay, Ken, 168-169

Lyttelton, Edward, 44

Maclagan, Archbishop, 103

Marshall (family), 190

Martin, Sir George, 58

Mason, Canon Arthur, 34, 80, 88

Maturin, Father, 96, 100

Meynell, Mr., 245

Mirfield Community, 103-104, 130, 137, 227, 239

Morris, William, 250

Murray, Prof., 199

Norway, King of, 98

Parsons, Rev. Mr., 16

Peel, Sidney, 50

Penny, Mr., 19

Persia, Shah of, 55

Pippet, Gabriel, 13, 168

Pitt Club, 156

Potter, Norman, 171

Reeman, Joseph, 14, 193

Reeve, Rev. John, 34, 128

Richard Raynal, Solitary, 178, 181, 185, 187

Ritual, 60-63

Roddy, collie, 126-128, 217

St. Hugh, 17

—— Monastery of, 129

Salford Cathedral, 209

Scott, Canon, 161

Selborne, Lord, quoted, 54

Sessions, Dr., 168

Sharrock, Canon, 173, 196, 199, 205, 207

Sidgwick, Arthur, 20

—— Henry (uncle), 20, 71, 73, 223

—— Mrs. (grandmother), 20

—— Nora (Mrs. Henry Sidgwick) (aunt), 73, 121

—— William (uncle), 20

Skarratt, Rev. Mr., 101

Spiers, Mr., 54-55

Stanmore, Lord, 95

Stevenson, R. L., 121

Streets and Lanes of the City, 79

Tait, Miss Lucy, 120

Temple, Archbishop, 103

Tennyson's "Mort d'Arthur," 179

Todd, Dr., Ross, 193

Tyrell, Father, 144

Vaughn, Dean, 81-84

Vaughn, Mrs., 83-85

Victoria, Queen, 114, 153

Wales, Prince and Princess of, 54

Walpole, Bishop G. H. S., 34

Warre, Dr., 46

Watson, Bishop, 154

Watt, Father, 168

Wellington College, 15, 19, 20

Westcott, Bishop, 86

Westminster, Cardinal Archbishop of, 209

Whitaker, Canon G. H., 34

Wilkinson, Bishop, 48, 128, 150

Woodchester Dominican Convent, 146

Wordsworth, Bishop John, 128

Wren, Mr., 52

THE END