er
light and fragrance; it might be studied, indeed, but easily and
superficially; not that it would not be better, perhaps, if he could
have approached other arts with penetrating insight; but he felt that
for himself, with his limitations, his feebleness, his faltering grasp,
nothing must come between him and his literary preoccupation. The
other arts might feed his soul indeed, but he could not serve them. He
found that he took great delight, and was always at ease, in the
company of musicians and painters, because he could understand and
interpret their point of view, their attitude of mind; while on the
other hand he could approach them with the humility, the perceptive
humility, which the artist desires as an atmosphere; he did not know
enough about the technical points to controvert and differ, while he
knew enough to feel inspired by the tense feeling of secrets,
understood and practised, which were yet hidden from ordinary eyes.
Art, then, and music became for Hugh as a sweet and remote illustration
of his own consecration--and indeed there were moments when, wearied by
his own strenuous toil, ploughing sadly through the dreary sands of
labour, that must close at intervals round the feet of the serious
craftsman, the sight of a picture hanging perhaps in a room full of
cheerful company, or the sound of music--a few bars rippling from an
open window, or stealing in faint gusts from the buttressed window of a
church lighted for evensong--came to him like a sacred cup, carried in
the hovering hands of a ministering angel, revealing to him the
delicate hidden joy of beauty of which he had almost lost sight in his
painful hurrying to some appointed end. _Hinc lucem et pocula sacra_,
said the old motto of Cambridge. The light was clear enough, and led
him forward, as it led the pilgrim of old, shining across a very wide
field. But the holy refreshment that was tendered him upon the way,
this was the blessed gift of those other arts which he dared not to
follow, but which he knew held within themselves secrets as dear as the
art which in his loneliness he pursued.

XXXV

Artistic Susceptibility--An Apologia--Temperament--Criticism of
Life--The Tangle

Hugh had found himself one evening in the Combination-room of his
college, in a little group of Dons who were discussing with great
subtlety and ardour the question of retaining Greek in the entrance
examinations of the university. It seemed to Hugh tha