religion; but here the
forces at work so often lost their delicacy and subtlety by being
compounded with grosser human influences, entangled with superstitions,
made to serve low and pitiful ends. In poetry there was none of
this--it was the most disinterested thing in the world. In the pure
medium of words, coloured by beauty and desire, all the remote, holy,
sweet secrets of the heart were blended into a rising strain; and it
was well to submit oneself, tranquilly and with an open heart, to the
calling of these sweet voices.

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

XXXIII

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

An art which had for Hugh an almost divine quality was the art of
music; an art dependent upon such frail natural causes, the vibration
of string and metal, yet upon the wings of which the soul could fly
abroad further than upon the wings of any other art. There was a
little vignette of Bewick's, which he had loved as a child, where a
minute figure sits in a tiny horned and